Online Marketing Blog

Yahoo! has announced that on Feb 5th, they will be introducing a quality score to the Yahoo Search Marketing ad system, “Panama”. To date, placement of ads on Yahoo and their network have been based on bid price alone. From the press release:

“The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page.”

Advertisers will be able to see the “quality index” for their ads within Panama along with an estimated average position and estimated forecast of clicks for their ad campaigns, based on budget allocation and ad quality.

Yahoo Takes Down Panama Geo-Targeting

Online Marketing Blog ranked #5 in top 150 Marketing Blogs – Todd And Power 150

Google Image Optimization – Chris Pearson

SEO Blogs get hacked – Search Engine Land

Optimizing Flash – Jonathan Hochman

Findory to fade away – Greg Linden

DMOZ taking submissions again – Search Engine Roundtable

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Our YSM account recently went through the upgrade and we’re going through the process of getting familiar with all the new platform features. After talking to my contact at Yahoo PR as well as Mona Elesseily from Page Zero who has written a book about the Yahoo Search Marketing program, I thought it would be good to get some insight directly from Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog readers. John Slade, Senior Director of Yahoo Global Product Management was kind enough to field a few questions for me.

For some good humor, check out the following posts by Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo and Matt Cutts from Google. Jeremey points out a striking similarity between the Yahoo and Google MSIE splash pages. Google has changed the splash page to something else by now.

Matt responds in that very politically correct and polite way that Matt does and then he points out how Yahoo has been copying Google’s PPC ad layouts.

I’ve seen other examples of this sort of thing shared with me by a search engine employee and I guess it’s bound to happen. They watch each other so closely and there are so many teams involved that stuff like this can slip by. Although, the ad formats and colors are pretty hard to miss.

Checking out the expo hall, there are always a few great deals and lots of free iPods to sign up for. I skipped most of the iPods this year as I was a afraid of all the follow-up emails and/or sales calls.

However, here is some good swag that I did pick up.

Click the image for layover descriptions.

• Google color changing orb.
• Unica Keychane game.
• Lycos fish stress ball & document clip.
• Netconcepts climbing hook and compass.
• Yellowpages highlighter with built in Post-It flags
• Network Solutions multi-color lightup pen.
• Ask pen that writes very nice and has a nice design.
• Bruce Clay Tangle toy.
• WebTrends magnets.
• Yahoo magnetic toy in tin.
• Truelocal rocket toy.
• DoubleClick electronic die.

In the tradition established this summer at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, there are more video interviews here in Chicago with interesting people that work in the search marketing industry. I’ve been shooting short videos with my trusty Sony Cybershot which you can see below.

First up is Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro who discusses a few details of their most recent eyetracking report which compares Google, Yahoo and MSN search results. Online Marketing Blog did a short review of this report in November.

You can find out more about Enquiro here and Gord writes a handy blog over at Out of my Gord.

Lately I’ve noticed a few mainstream web publications making concerted efforts to solicit user generated content. Enabling consumers to submit news gives media access to millions of potential stories they might otherwise not know about, or not have a scoop on. I know our local (and likely national) public radio station has been soliciting user generated content and news stories for at least a year and so do some TV stations. Also, Topix.net allows users to interact with news stories on their forums which, according to Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta, has enabled a big boost in traffic.

Most recently I noticed that Yahoo News has launched You Witness News that allows you to upload photos and video for potential use in Yahoo News stories. According to comScore, Yahoo News is the #1 online news source, so marketers should take notice of such an opportunity.

Yahoo Search Marketing sent out an email today announcing changes. Some of the manage bids information will be removed and replaced with “Estimated Average Position” and “Bid Range for Top Positions”.

Here are the details from the email:

In early December 2006, some of the information on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available. We will be removing the “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns from the current account interface. The View Bids tool will also be removed.

These columns will be replaced with two new columns of data:

• Estimated Average Position
  This displays an estimate of the average position your listing may achieve, based on your bid and the current bids of other advertisers.

Wow, what a party! Yahoo had a very private, invite-only party last night at the Palms Towers in the Playboy suite.

Thank you to Yahoo PR for letting me bring Karen and Jolina from the TopRank team. This was their first conference and Karen’s fist time in Las Vegas. There were only 100 or so people invited to this party from a conference of several thousand, so it made quite an impression.

The Playboy Suite was quite a place. Here are a few photos:

I’ve got to run to do my next presentation but will post more photos later or you can check my Flickr page. Nice job on the party Yahoo!

In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.

What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.

Why should you create an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap outlines all the URLs on a site so that search engines can find them all easily. Much like a normal sitemap, it just lists all the pages however, an XML sitemap is optimized for search engines, not for people. By giving search engines a list of URLs on your site, you are increasing the number of pages they know about and can refer traffic to.

Manoj over at Web Analytics World blog has announced the release of a new eyetracking study by Enquiro that takes an in-depth look at interactions with Google, Yahoo! and MSN using eye tracking methodology. Many search marketers are familiar with Enquiro’s original eye tracking report on Google. (pdf)

The new Google/Yahoo/MSN whitepaper covers:

• How We Scan a Listing
• Semantic Mapping
• Information Scent
• Thin Slicing
• Banner Blindness
• Growth of Navigational Search
• Impact of Bolded Search Queries and Icons
• Perceived Relevancy
• Golden Section Theory
• Portal Entry Success
• Interactions with Top Sponsored
• Interactions with Side Sponsored
• Interactions with Top Organic
• Interactions with Bottom Organic
• Interactions with Vertical Results

Via TW, Fortune reports that Yahoo may be resuming talks with AOL about an acquisition as a play against rival Google.

“FORTUNE has learned from multiple sources that Yahoo! recently approached Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE’s publisher) about buying America Online – essentially trying to jump-start talks that broke down a year ago. A source close to Yahoo disputes that Yahoo approached Time Warner and says that there are no active conversations between the two companies.”

The story also offers speculation about what Yahoo’s next moves might be:

• Sell to Microsoft
• Merge with eBay
• Stay the course