Yahoo Stepping up to Play

by Alicia (Whitehouse) Allyn, Associate Director, Client Strategy & Development

Let’s take a moment and give Yahoo a little attention today. There has been a lot of hype around Bing lately and Google will always have “just google it” as a common saying so now it’s time to give props to Yahoo.

Yahoo launched their largest global branding campaign ever this week, “It’s all about YOU”. This new campaign includes online, TV, radio, print, and outdoor creative that emphasizes how Yahoo! is focused on you—the consumer. Take a look at the Yahoo new ad. They even changed their yodel, “yahooooo”.

Step two, they have had a few product enhancements including a new Yahoo home page, mail and messenger, and an all-new search experience. I’ll sum up the key features for the new search:

  • Intelligent Search Results: enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites that will appear automatically in your results
  • Feature-Rich Experience: including SafeSearch which helps protect from viruses and Search Pad which helps you track sites and make notes by detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits.
  • Search Assist Expansion: added to every Yahoo page in the US to provide concepts related to your query.
  • Revamped Image and Video search: now a similar experience with additional content on the left-hand column, enhancements for looking up travel information, and larger in-line play video features.
  • Improved total and perceived load time: reducing page weight

Step three, new Panama features…finally! The new Ad Delivery Report shows the referring traffic for your search campaigns, whether it be a Yahoo site or a Yahoo partner site. If you do not have access to web analytics this is huge. Not only does it show you the domain your traffic is coming from but it also includes the performance for that web traffic. Haven’t you noticed big spikes in your traffic every so often on Yahoo that kills your click through rate? Now you can see what site picked up your ad and decide if you want to keep that traffic or not. If you find traffic you don’t want, you can enter the domain in the Blocked Domains tool.

To top it off, they now adjust your click charges according to their assessment of the quality of traffic delivered by those sites. This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic. It’s not exactly clear on how they evaluate the quality of the traffic but it’s a step in the right direction.

More to come as Yahoo continues to be a player in the search space and as the Bing/Yahoo partnership unfolds in the next year.

For all you search marketers, take advantage of the tools you have available to you, keep up with trends that help mold the strategy for your accounts, and continue to share and learn with your fellow peers.

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