The message might have come out a little late yesterday for those covering the industry to pick it up, but almost assuredly, this topic will dominate the industry today. Then again, maybe not. Postings about the topic are scarce, and usually such postings are often a good proxy for article coverage. So, what did Yahoo change? Put simply, if you run ad listings that send users directly to an email submission page, ala incentive promotion sites, or a lead generation landing page without significant, targeted content, expect to have an increased number of ads banned. The policy, which might have existed previously but was not enforced, revolves around Yahoo’s desire to “create a marketplace where both users and advertisers benefit.” Yahoo’s actions it would seemingly suggest that many of the activities of lead generation advertisers and incentive marketers now fall outside that mission. But, wait there’s more.
For those interested, the email received by many advertisers reads as follows:
Yahoo! Search Marketing no longer accepts listings for web sites where the primary purpose is the collection of personally identifiable information to be used for consumer or promotional marketing, or related purposes. We will also not accept listings for advertisers that link to or redirect to such sites. We have made this change to our editorial guidelines in order to continue providing users with highly relevant search results and a valuable online search experience. Our Listing Guidelines help us maintain the level of quality our distribution partners and search users expect. If you’d like to review our Listing Guidelines, please click on the link below: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/relevancy.php
A visit to the link above will not immediately put into context the change or tell you where to look. The best bet is in the section labeled “Content.” Here, it states the level of detail required to list on a particular keyword, saying that 1) there must be a strong, direct relationship between keywords and the content, purpose, and theme of the advertising site; and, 2) the advertiser’s site must have substantial content that is clearly and obviously reflective of the keyword’s meaning. For example, if you promote a car loan lead generation site, Yahoo will most likely prohibit your bidding on the word, “used cars” as in Yahoo’s mind, the standard auto loan lead gen. page appears directed at new cars. While used car buyers need loans too, Yahoo has chosen to take the hard line on ads that require the user to infer.
Elsewhere on their search listing guidelines page, Yahoo spells out another helpful piece of information for understand their thinking. This information also relates to content and describes a bare bones site that would not pass their manual review process. Such a site (that would not pass) would include only a) a brief description, b) a search term/phrase included for the sole purpose of having a reference to that term, c) a text link, banner or tiles that direct users to another web site, d) lists of text without additional content (for example, a site listing all the diseases that a given drug treats does not have sufficient content to qualify for the individual diseases as search terms), and e) contact information related to the search term (for example, an address, phone number, Web address, e-mail, stock symbol, etc.) Helpful as this refresher on Yahoo content policy is, it is not obvious on the link Yahoo provides does it discuss the content of the email they sent out.
Yahoo may not want the users to have to infer what a site is about, but they don’t mind us having to infer to what their email refers. Given that disconnect, let’s examine the potential impacts of the policy change. The major group impacted as referenced above is the direct advertisers and their affiliates in the lead generation and incentive promotion space. Zeroing in on the incentive promotion space, here is a group of advertisers that have invested heavily at leveraging the diversity of search. No longer does a company offer a handful of consumer electronic goods, the sophisticated players in this space now can find a way to directly (with product giveaways) or indirectly (via gift cards) to reach tens of thousands of products and keywords. The mechanisms for doing so might not be impacted, but the companies must retool what they display and go through the arduous task of resubmitting. The same is true on a smaller scale, page-wise, but on a larger scale with respect to keywords for the lead generators. Each month, the two combined must do tens of millions of dollars on Yahoo, so the question is whether Yahoo is making a statement about our industry or reacting to something else.
I might be thinking too optimistically, but I do not think Yahoo’s policy change is a reflection on our industry. Instead, I see it as a reaction on their part over fear that they might be losing users and damaging third party partners over the ads shown. It’s a move that might protect consumers but could hurt Yahoo more. Compared to Google, their manual review process made advertising with them cumbersome and slow. This change only makes it worse, and it impacts a group of people that helped Yahoo increase not just the total amount of keywords that have coverage but their competitiveness too.
Fortunately, for Yahoo, taking the conservative route will most likely hurt them less than a radical shift the other way. Ultimately, Yahoo is simply reiterating the market demands. Users want to find what they expect to find. We have reached a point where the user feels more empowered, and the engines, much like wanting to index the most pages, want to claim relevancy, supremacy. For those of us that had it easy, this change certainly sucks, as it requires us using previously good margin dollars to get back to a level of parity. When we do though, we’ll find that fewer tweaks will need to be made and the caliber of conversion will be higher. We would have to do it anyway, and many have already done it. Yahoo just forced the rest to get on board quicker. We should thank them… that or call them OSHA.
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