Some important news for Yahoo advertisers. Beginning February 5, the ranking / position of your ads will no longer be based solely on your bid amount. Instead, they’ll be ranked by both bid amount and ad quality, similar to the way Google does things.
This change, which will impact all advertisers, is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding and more on the quality of your ads. By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and reduced cost for your ads.
An ad’s quality will be determined by:
- Its historical performance—the ad’s click-through rate relative to its position in search results
- Its expected performance—determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time
More information here.
Add Your CommentsGoogle announced yesterday a new feature called “hosted business pages.”
Designed for small businesses who don’t have a website but still want to advertise online with Google, the feature is basically a single, informational webpage that you can use to tell people more about your business, how to contact you, etc..
Hosted Business Pages are currently only available for new advertisers in the US.
The search engine optimization industry has a huge problem - it’s plagued with snake oil salesmen.
“Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings”, “Submit Your Site To 10,000,000 SEARCH ENGINES”. In fact, just now I got a call from such a slinger. Here’s the Coles Notes of that conversation:
Con: Hello Sir. Is this Vagablond.com?
Me: Yes. How can I help you.
Con: Wow. This is a huge honor. I must say sir, you have an incredible site. Soooo…informative.
Ok…I know! I should have hung up here. But I wanted to hear what sort of crap he was going to feed me.
Me: Ok. How can I help you.
Con: Sir. Did you build this site yourself?
Me: With help from many others.
Con: You have an amazing site Sir. One of the best I have ever seen.
Me: Our site is for sale to the right buyer. Are you interested Sir?
Con: No No. But I can help you a great deal. Can you go to Google Sir. And type in the word “travel” in the search engine.
Me: Ok. I’ve done that.
Con: I cannot see your site Sir. And it’s proven that most visitors don’t go beyond the first page. We can guarantee to get your site on this first page instead of giving this succeess to your competitors.
Me: Oh. And how do you do that?
Con: Through our proprietary technology we’ve developed with a large team. We will also create multiple domains that contain your keywords.
Me: But that is against Google’s terms and conditions, multiple domains with the same content.
Con: That is only your interpretation Sir. I assure you that you only will have success.
Me: How much?
Con: Just $30 a month for up to 10 keywords of your choice.
Me: Travel, Casino, Wine, Microsoft, Google, ….
Me: Do you have some examples of clients you’ve had success with?
Con: Of course. Please go here on our web page. You see the sample reports. There you can see Ford, Boeing, JC Penny
Me: (I won’t tell you what I said to him from here on in)
Folks…if it sounds too good to be true - IT IS!
Guy Kawasaki on Public Relations:
It used to be that ink begat buzz. Life was simple then: you sucked up to the Wall Street Journal, one of its reporters wrote about your product, and the buzz began. Journalists no longer anticipate or create buzz–rather, they react to it: ???Everyone is buzzing about FaceBook. There must be something to this, so I had better write a story about it.??? This role reversal has fried people’s minds.
The latest development is that blogs beget buzz. Blogs have changed everything because they represent a cheap, effective podium for creating buzz on a massive scale.
John Battelle points to a paper on Pay Per Click search. It’s a quick read (6 pages) offering an overview of the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine market and ideas on how to optimize campaigns for maximum results.
You can download the PDF here.
And… if you want to learn more about Pay Per Click advertising (Google Adwords in particular), be sure to check out Andrew Goodman’s book, Winning Results with Google AdWords.
MediaPost has an article this morning looking at why some marketers might resist advertising on blogs:
“By their very nature, blogs deprive marketers of the control they’ve come to expect: a company’s ad could conceivably sit next to a post ripping its product or brand. Media firms have also expressed concerns about scale, worrying that only a handful of blogs will ever achieve anything resembling critical mass.”
Resistance is futile. Control no longer exists. Might as well get use to that fact and get a head start.
A couple weeks back I wrote about how a furniture retailer was using Flickr to create conversations with its customers. And here, HyperGene Media talks about how companies can use Flickr to help market their products.
In addition to being an excellent photo-sharing tool, Flickr is also a good viral marketing tool. Sharing “official” product images or screenshots on Flickr with good explanations and related hyperlinks is a marketing tool for several reasons. These include:
1. Awareness building, education and learning tool.
2. Communication tool and feedback channel.
3. Seeds of viral marketing.
4. Affinity, relationship building.
5. Customer communication channel.
6. Enhance company’s hub in the network.
Using RSS subscription buttons from the major portals makes it much easier and quicker for people to subscribe to your RSS content. Below is a round-up of links to button-maker tools for MSN, AOL and Yahoo.
Bonus:
Standard XML feed button
Note: I don’t have these buttons on this blog yet because I’m having a few problems with my RSS feed. Once I get that all sorted out however, you can subscribe in the right hand column.
Design Public is a retailer - they sell modern furniture. They also have blog which they use to have a close, two-way relationship with hundreds of potential customers every day.
Building relationships - Design Public gets it. Look what else they’re doing:
We love Flickr. Antoi, our customer service guru and fashion designer, uses it daily and runs about five groups, so she’s been harping on us to start our own.
We just did.
It’s called “Fresh New Spaces“, and we aim to make it a great showcase of modern interiors. Anyone can join, anyone can post anything - as long as it is related to the theme of making an interior space “fresh, new, and modern”. So show off your interior design talents - let’s see what you’ve got!
That’s awesome! Invite your customers to join in and express themselves. And do it all for $0 using a free online photo management and sharing application with a built-in cult-like following. If I had a fab apartment I know I’d join in!
Yahoo is now including blogs along with “mainstream” news as part of their news search service. If you’re a blogger and you’d like your content included, you’ve got to submit your RSS feed to myYahoo. Do that here.
While your at it, don’t forget to promote your site with myYahoo.
