June 5th, 2007 by 
Chad
So Yahoo “officially” launched their Quality Based Pricing a few days ago. According to Yahoo the key points to this system are:
- We’ll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners’ sites.
- Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
- Discounts will automatically be applied to your account.
To me this is pretty much a non announcement. For one, it’s a totally black box system. Advertisers have no insight to the conversion rates of the various sites and partners that are used to calculate the quality rating. We are just supposed to wait and hope for discounts occasionally based on Yahoo’s calculations. We can’t make any changes to where our ads are displayed to react to quality issues. This seems to be an effort by Yahoo to say “Hey, we care about quality, especially on our content network, so please use it”.
Posted in PPC, General, Yahoo | 
3 Comments »
February 6th, 2007 by Chad
As most people know, the new Yahoo ranking model was launched on Monday. Basically it’s their version of Google quality score, while not quite as opaque as Google. They actually provide some visibility into your quality score by a ranking of 1-5 in the form of blue bar. I am looking forward to this change, as I think it will help weed out some of the people jumping into niches with high bids and throwing everyone off. You will actually have to do some work to rank well, which is always a good thing for the long term search engine marketers.
According to Yahoo, your quality index is determined by:
1. The ad’s expected performance - which is determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo’s ranking algorithms.
2. The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to its position on the page.
So it would seem they are taking the view of how the ad group performs as a whole, rather than individual keywords. I checked out some of my campaigns this morning and was pleased at how they are running so far under the new system. I saw quite a few of these babies!
Booya!
We will see how it all shakes down in the coming weeks. I am loving the traffic I am getting from YSM these days. They are sending me more clicks that Adwords sometimes!
Posted in PPC, General, Yahoo | Post a comment »
December 6th, 2006 by Chad
One of the new metrics in the PPC universe is the concept of keyword assists. The idea is that the final keyword that actually converts the action you are tracking may have had a trail of non-converting keywords that lead to this action. In other words, the keyword or phrase that the customer’s search began with was probably not the keyword that ended in a conversion. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the value that these “helper” keywords have, that don’t directly show on stats? Well Yahoo is on the ball with their new analytics program built into their PPC interface. You can configure it to count the number of times that a keyword contributed to the conversion of another keyword within a timeframe of 45 days. I think this is a significant stat that can really be put to good use in optimizing campaigns!
Posted in PPC, Yahoo, Panama | 1 Comment »
November 22nd, 2006 by Chad
I upgraded to the eagerly anticipated “Panama” the other day. This is the loooong overdue update to Yahoo’s sponsored search interface.
Here are some of my random thoughts:
The interface has a slick flash feel to it, and it works well in Firefox.
The Geo-targeting with map-based interface is awesome. You can now target right down to the city level. The only negative is that you still can’t target other countries like the UK without having a separate Yahoo UK account.
When you are entering keywords, it has a tool which essentially a keyword scraper. You just input a URL and it pulls keywords from the page. Nice, Yahoo is going black hat!
When you are entering your bid prices it has a slider bar that shows you how your bid affects your number of clicks, as well are you estimated position and share of clicks. Slider bars are always a crowd pleaser.
You can enter Google like strings while entering your keywords. For example:
hawaii trip**1.75**http://travel.yahoo.com**trips to Hawaii**N
I just started playing with their analytics tracking but it definitely looks promising. You even have the ability to track keyword assists. (more on assists in another post to come).
I would like to see more match types, instead of the standard and advanced.
The bulk upload via spreadsheet is great.
Posted in PPC, Yahoo, Panama | Post a comment »
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