You’ll be ready for the expected October move of Yahoo! Search ad serving to adCenter
Last week, we completed the transition of the back-end technology for English-language Yahoo! organic search results in the U.S. and Canada. This week, advertisers can start transitioning their paid Yahoo! Search Marketing account, in anticipation of the Yahoo! ad serving transition which we expect to start mid-October. We encourage you to transition your account before the ad serving transition begins, so that you are ready to reach more than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada* on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partners.
Start your account transition now Beginning today, you may log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and initiate your transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter. We’ve created a detailed Transition Checklist that you should review now, to help ensure that you’re prepared to make a smooth transition to adCenter, as well as a Feature Comparison Guide, to help you get familiar with adCenter’s features and capabilities.
In the afternoon, partners split up into separate tracks: Search Partners and Integrated Partners. Here are a few highlights from the afternoon sessions:
Gage the effectiveness of your Twitter campaign with Yahoo! Web Analytics
The launch of Twitter’s “promoted tweets” allows advertisers to get their messages out on Twitter without crippling Twitter’s democratic experience. Advertisers are lining up to take advantage—and so should you.
But once your promoted tweets campaign is active, how do you track it? Yahoo! Web Analytics has the answer.
“Unlike other web analytics solutions, Yahoo! Web Analytics gives advertisers the flexibility to log into their account and see visitors right after they’ve reached their web site,” writes Matt Lillig, a senior analytics lead at Yahoo!. “No more waiting for hours to see how their campaign is performing. With real-time measurement, advertisers can follow the viral effect of the ad campaign and optimize their Twitter advertising efforts accordingly.”
Retail Pulse, the monthly report that taps into Yahoo! data to track changes in U.S. online shopping trends, confirms that back-to-school shopping started earlier than in 2009:
“Back to School” searches on Yahoo! entered the top term list as early as the first week of July.
Search for “backpacks” on retailer sites surged after July 5.
Users who visited Office Supplies sites also increased over four consecutive weeks.
Women’s passion for fashion
The report also highlighted that search in the Apparel category has increased over four consecutive weeks, recovering from a four-month slide. Specifically, Yahoo! Shopping click volume in the Clothing category saw an up-trend. The number of women aged 18-49 who visited sites in the Department Store category has also increased since July 5.
So what does this mean for you? As we noted in an earlier post, if ranking well in organic search results is important to your business, here are three tips for you:
Review your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search for the keywords that work best for you and note any differences in your rank, now that the results are being powered by Bing.
Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.
For more on the organic search transition, see the FAQs for managed advertisers at the Yahoo! Transition Center.
Deep mobile, common courtesy, spooky display and refining your campaigns
Yahoo's Paul Cushman checks his Twitter feed at SES
Day two of the Search Engine Strategies confab was, in a way, even more intense than the first, with sessions going deep into the details of mobile, search and display advertising. Here are some lessons learned.
Give their thumbs a rest
It’s one of Paul Cushman’s (he’s Yahoo!’s Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy) favorite truisms, invoked at the session “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies: “Mobile is a channel, not a strategy.” Panelists Cindy Krum (Rank-Mobile), Sandeep Aggarwal (Caris & Co.) and Michael Martin (Mobile Martin) then proved his point, going way deep into the geek weeds of mobile SEO and usability.
One key takeaway for mobile eCommerce marketers is a simple one. “It’s a pain in the butt to enter your financial information on the phone with your thumbs,” said Krum. Instead, consider employing a payment solution like PayPal to make it easier on the user—and always provide a bail-out, one-touch phone number. After all, mobile users are on the phone, right? (Which, not incidentally, is another Cushmanism.)
Courtesy counts, online and off
At the session “Twitternation & Automation,” moderator Matt McGowan, Publisher and Head of U.S., Incisive Media, announced a surprise panelist. In addition to the previously announced speakers (Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media), 140Conference founder, renowned twitterphile and friend of Yahoo! Jeff Pulver would also be presenting.
Pulver gave his stock, “it-all-started-with-HAM-radio” and “Twitter is about love” speech while the other panelists patiently waited their turns. When it was time for Falke to give her talk on how she handles multiple Twitter accounts, Pulver pounced, interrupting repeatedly with quips and snide, though intelligent, remarks. During Madden’s admittedly “gray hat” Twitter automation talk, Pulver ejaculated, “You are EVIL.”
Granted, Madden pays legion of sweat shop copywriters in the Philippines $1.40 an hour to create fake Twitter personas and stories, but the effect was that of a teenager flaming others in an online forum circa 1999. It did, however, make for one of the liveliest sessions at SES. Pulver eventually backed off a little, saying during the Q&A period, “It’s evil, but it’s also brilliant, and I respect that.” Well, after all, the best panelists are entertainers and the best entertainers are insult comics.
Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy for Yahoo!, talks about the session he moderated, “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies,” at the SES conference in San Francisco, August 18, 2010, as well as some of Yahoo’s initiatives in mobile.
Naughty or nice holidays; search is a-changin’; location rules; and mocking “The Social Network”
2010 holiday season: naughty or nice?
There’s no denying it: The 2009 holiday season was naughty. It registered the first sales decline since the early 1950s. But a new study predicts that the 2010 holiday season will be nicer to retailers—thanks in part to mobile. The study shows the percentage of consumers who buy on mobile phones has grown in the last year from 10% to 13%. It also reports 37.7% of U.S. consumers identified the Web as the media that they can’t live without, above television at 21.6%. Wonder what the author of the new Wired article entitled “The Web is Dead” would say about that.
Search is a-changin’ After all the anticipation and preparation, the Yahoo! and Microsoft alliance is here. Organic transition begins this week and paid search transition testing has already started. And the whole world is watching—or, at least, The Wall Street Journal,Search Engine Land and Reuters. One reason for the heightened interest? According to comScore, Yahoo! gained market share last month while Google dropped. Clearly change is in the air for the search world.
Mocking “The Social Network”? Twilarious! The trailer for the upcoming movie “The Social Network” has everything we love: nerds, Ivy League intrigue, million-dollar lawsuits, and Justin Timberlake trying to act. But the recent Twitter movie trailer spoof is even better. It’s got LOL lines (with fewer than 140 characters) like “If Twitter was as useless and boring as they say, then someone would have tweeted it.” But our favorite: “If you put a ’tw’ in front of any word, you make it infinitely cooler.” We certainly love our Twhiskey.
Fun facts and one big preview from Yahoo! at SES San Francisco
The Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco kicked off with a bang and ended with, well, a Y bang (Y!).
The opening bang
Jeffrey Hayzlett, former “Celebrity CMO” for Eastman Kodak gave the kickoff keynote, recounting his sometimes hysterically funny journey through the corporate rocks and shoals while trying to re-invigorate one of world’s great heritage brands with new life—a company at one time so out of touch it actually let its trademark “Kodak moment” expire. The key? Getting people involved, by talking and evangelizing the brand through social media. (They actually renamed a poorly named product using suggestions via Twitter in a few days.)
“Build hearts and minds not eyeballs and ears… the rest will follow,” he said.
Companies, said Hayzlett, should build “emotional technologies,” strong enough that people would run back into a burning building to save them (like family photos). And build them fast. “It’s OK to make mistakes, but if you’re going to make ‘em, make ‘em big… no one’s gonna die!”
Dueling Y-bangs
You’ve heard the old Gap Band song that goes, “you dropped bomb on me, baby.” Well, that’s just what Yahoo’s Wendi Sturgis did in one of the afternoon sessions. Its “stage name,” as Wendi put it, is the Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange, and it’s poised to revolutionize the way publishers aggregate and present content. The new, open platform will allow publishers to draw together not only Yahoo! premium content but also search content (such as the Yahoo! Trending Now module), and user-generated content from sources like Twitter, among others. Bang, there it is! Stay tuned for further announcements.
Organic transition beginning this week; paid search transition testing happening now
As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’ve reached some very significant milestones and wanted to share this important news with you.
Yahoo! organic search transition to begin
Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.
Last week, we completed the transition of the back-end technology for English-language Yahoo! organic search results in the U.S. and Canada. This week, advertisers can start transitioning their paid Yahoo! Search Marketing account, in anticipation of the Yahoo! ad serving transition which we expect to start mid-October. We encourage you to transition your account before the ad serving transition begins, so that you are ready to reach more than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada* on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partners.
