If you’re a search marketer, chances are you’ve just run through the last items on your post-holiday To Do list. Got those keyword bid prices down again to pre-Black Friday levels? Check. Swapped out the “free shipping” and “no-hassle return” ads for creative about gift card redemption? Done. Migrated your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to the new Panama platform? Ummm…
There’s no way for anyone outside of Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale CA home base to know, but chances seem pretty good that many search marketers, particularly those involved in retail, have had too many other things on their mind to concern themselves with making the switch to Yahoo!’s new SEM bid management platform. And that’s okay. After announcing that it intended to start transitioning search advertisers in Q4 2006, Yahoo! adopted a strictly voluntary approach that accommodated marketers who wanted to defer the change to some time less hectic and crucial than the pre-Christmas shopping rush.
But at some unspecified point, you or your SEM agency will have to make that Panamanian trip. Yahoo! hasn’t given a drop-dead date, but it has floated strong suggestions that it would like to see accounts moved to the new interface by the end of January. Any later, and marketers will bump up against Panama Phase Two: the introduction of Panama’s quality-ranking algorithm, which will factor in clickthroughs, landing pages and other relevance criteria to determine which ads most deserve to be served in a keyword search.
And it goes without saying that you don’t want to be dealing with both a new Yahoo! Search Marketing interface and a new ranking system at the same time. So if you haven’t migrated to Panama yet, now’s the time to start packing a bag.
To get an unbiased idea of the benefits and issues that await marketers who move to the new Yahoo! platform, SearchLine spoke with Mona Elesseily, Internet marketing strategist with Toronto-based search marketing firm Page Zero Media. Elesseily has already authored one handbook on strategizing for the old Yahoo! search platform, and she’s actively working on assembling another one on working in the new Panama environment.
Given that marketers are still in the process of trying it out, and that a large portion of the new platform won’t be unveiled for a few months, how does the new Yahoo! stack up to Elesseily so far?
For starters, she says, it offers some major benefits to marketers in the shape of a much more user-friendly interface and more continuous uptime. “One complaint of advertisers on the old platform was that it wasn’t at all user-friendly,” Elesseily says. “You’d go there, you’d get confused and frustrated, and you’d leave. The new structure is much more thought out and easy to use.”
Part of that ease of use comes from new layouts for account management functions, and part from new tools that Yahoo! is making available to manage bids, including a dashboard that lets marketers use tabs to move among campaigns, reports and administration pages and create new campaigns on their home page. At this point, Yahoo! has done a pretty thorough job of publicizing those changes with road shows at all the major conventions in Q4. Marketers who are still unsure what the new interface looks like would do best to check the Yahoo! Upgrade Center at www.newsponsoredsearch.yahoo.com, or the new official Yahoo! Search Marketing blog at www.ysmblog.com.
The other big plus for marketers in Yahoo!’s Panama move, according to Elesseily, is that it will minimize the downtime that periodic upgrades in the old system used to require. “Typically, they would pull the system offline, upgrade it over a weekend and then put it back up,” she says. “Inevitably, bugs would crop up and they’d then get flooded with phone calls from people whose accounts weren’t working, or their ads weren’t showing. The new system is designed to take smaller, incremental upgrades rather than the massive ones, and it hopefully won’t need to come offline, causing massive disruptions to service.”
Then there are the new tools that Yahoo! search marketers will be able to take advantage of. For one thing, under Panama rules, users will be able to geotarget their ads on the YSM network down to the DMA level. The map-based interface for this feature lets users point and click to include or exclude states and metros, as well as typing in ZIP codes. Provided by WhereonEarth, a geolocation company that Yahoo! bought in 2005, the feature will also serve up ads based on user intent. In other words, it knows the difference between New York’s Soho ‘hood and London’s and can determine which ads relate to which.
In a podcast interview last October with search marketing expert Jennifer Slegg, Yahoo! senior vice president of advertising platforms and products said this geotargeting tool would in time be extended to the Web pages in the Yahoo! Publisher Network.
Of these new tools, Elesseily expresses the greatest interest in one that tracks “assists” provided by keywords that may not in themselves earn high conversion rates. According to her, Yahoo! Panama will use browser cookies to track up to 45 days’ worth of click history on a term or a stack of 30 assists leading up to a conversion—whichever comes first. These assists will then be available in advertisers’ account reporting.
Knowing which terms have provided assists will help marketers place a proper bid value on those terms that at first glance don’t seem to be winning any useful conversions. “Under the old Yahoo! system– or any other system for that matter– the conversion is attributed to the last keyword typed in for a search,” Elesseily says. “If I typed in ‘camera’, then ‘Sony camera’ and then ‘Sony model XXX camera’ and then bought online, my conversion would be attributed to that last very specific keyword. So as a marketer, I might be tempted to get rid of both ‘camera’ and ‘Sony camera’ if they look like they’re not converting. But with a view of keyword assists, I’ll think twice about getting rid of those if I know they help another term convert. In fact, I might spend more money on those assisting terms.”
Spending more money is at the heart of another set of tools in the new Yahoo! designed to help marketers manage their reach and position for a particular keyword or ad group. Specifically, one new tool shows the current price for a top ad position on the Yahoo! Search results page for this keyword, along with the price for the lowest available position. This lets users find the necessary range for bids associated with an ad group, or estimate the cost of coming out first with a particularly important sponsored ad.
That range-finding will be particularly important in Panama, because Yahoo! is taking away the top-bid visibility of its old system, where marketers used to be able to see who was lead ad on a specific keyword and then beat that rival by bidding a penny more.
Another Panamanian budget-setting tool promises to give marketers a pictorial view of how great a portion of the “market” of clicks on a keyword they’ll capture with a specific bid. Advertisers can enter their cost-per-click bid and get a graph showing what estimated monthly clicks, ad position and click share that bid will produce at current competing bid levels. Using a slider, the advertiser can then raise or (in theory, at least) lower that bid and see the projected changes in click share and position at other levels.
It’s a nifty little widget, designed to give marketers the ammunition they may need to campaign for larger pay-per-click budgets from their higher-ups. But Elesseily points out that the tools still have to stand up to the reality test—something that won’t be done until many more advertisers have twiddled the sliders, guided off the bid ranges, and then checked the Yahoo! projections against the real-world results contained in their search logs.
“The reliability of these tools is the question that everyone wants an answer to right now,” she says. “But I don’t think we’ll have that answer until everyone migrates over to the new system and we get a discourse happening. The proof is in the pudding, and we haven’t really tasted this pudding yet.”
Elesseily points out that the Yahoo! forecasting tools beat out Google’s similar apps for specificity. “With Google, you plug in your [keyword bid] and you’ll just get a message saying, ‘Your budget is adequate,’ or ‘You may want to raise your bid.’ The Yahoo! tool is much more granular”–although she’s taking a wait-and-see stance on its accuracy.
One issue on which Elesseily says she’s heard grumbling from some Panama immigrants involves the structure under which individual keywords are organized into ad groups. While many advertisers have already sorted their keywords into groups in order to manage them at a higher level, some have not, for various reasons. And many of these unsorted advertisers have found that in making the move to the Panama platform, Yahoo! has automatically sorted their loose keywords by theme, often into groupings that they themselves would not have chosen.
The problem can be corrected after the move, but only through re-separating the keywords and their creative, Elesseily says; there’s no reverting to the pre-Panama platform once you’ve made the changeover.
This happened to one of the accounts managed by Elesseily’s firm, which ran separate keyword/creative combinations for teaching jobs in Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania and other states, keeping them distinct from each other for strategic reasons. When that account migrated to Panama, Yahoo! lumped all those keywords into one group, forcing Page Zero to go back in and separate them again.
“To avoid days of headaches, I’d recommend going in before the transition and making sure you set up groups that you want,” Elesseily says. “If you have categories already set up, Panama won’t mess around with them.” And this is a transition expedient only: Once you’re in Panama, you can sort those grouped terms back into their individual selves and manage them as such to your heart’s content.
Some reported issues in the migration to Yahoo! Panama have not made it to Elesseily’s radar screen. For example, some search marketers have reported in online forums that although Yahoo! Search had upped its minimum bid to 10 cents, they have been benefiting from one-cent bids grandfathered in from the old Overture or GoTo days. But after switching to Panama, they report receiving notices from Yahoo! that those former bids will no longer be honored and must be raised to the 10-cent minimum. In one case, an advertiser reported having 2,000 keywords out at 1 cent per click.
Elesseily says she hasn’t had any experience with such enforced increases. But she does expect that her firm will be vigilant about watching PPC spending once Yahoo! rolls out the quality index portion of its Panama platform, probably late in Q1 2007. That will rank search ads in a way that closely resembles Google, calculating relevance by looking at clickthrough performance, landing-page quality and other factors.
To get them used to thinking ad quality, Yahoo! has already introduced a visible quality index for its current advertisers, in the form of a series of color bars on their ad management pages. The more bars, from 1 to 5, the higher quality ranking Yahoo! has accorded the ad. Still, ads that do well now may find their rankings cut when the Yahoo! quality index goes into full operation.
“When they turn that ranking on, your ad position could go from first to fortieth or vice versa,” Elesseily says. “There’s not much you can do to prepare, because it will be a very different algorithm. It will be more important than ever to watch your accounts carefully. If you don’t have time to do that often, then set your daily account limits lower, to make sure you’re not surprised by a big marketing bill.”
She herself plans to take the first route and peer into the Yahoo! accounts in her charge several times a day—‘to make sure that nothing too crazy is going on.”
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