Making information work

I am sitting in a seminar room here in Stockholm waiting for a presentation about the new sponsored search platform. A guy named Gulshan Verma who is a Directory of Product Marketing at Yahoo Search Marketing.  Ill try to do this quickly and real time.

• Has been in development for 18 months.
• Is still in developmen, so this presentation is confidential (yeah, right)
• Agenda: 1. Upgrade, 2. Campaign Management, 3. Ad Ranking Model
• Moving from a linear system to a group system. Looks like Adwords to me
• You can control and monitor the campaign on several different levels - Campaign / Ad Group / Keyword / Ad
• All bids and campaigns currently active will remain active after upgrade
• Yahoo will call each client to inform them of when the upgrade is going
• An upgrade will take “around an hour”. Unless you are “large”. Then it might take “48 hours” …
• When the system is updated, there will be a suggestion of new structure wich you as an advertiser will need to accept using a “Upgrade Now” button
• All old data will will remain in the old account
• There will be different login-points for the new system and old system
• The Yahoo people locally will deal with all of the upgrade process issues
• New features - Geo targeting, Campaign spend caps, forecasting, fast ad activation, ad testing, campaign scheduling, content match. All these will be available as you upgrade - immediately.
• The geo targeting tool allows geographic search terms to always “win” over IP address. Searching for “London Florist” will bring up London florists even if you are in Stockholm
• The geo targeting tool also takes into account what weather they are looking at, where they registered their email-address, does a local search and gives default area, looks a lot at a movie theater in a particular city to decide where you are (scary? cool?)
• By default, after upgrade you will targeting only your local country with your ads
• You can target counties here in Sweden, but not cities it seems like
• The geo targeting doesnt work abroad even if it sort of should. If you sell hotels in Stockholm, and target Europe and North America, and someone in Japan searches for “hotels Stockholm”, your ad will not show. To ensure that it does, you need to target Japan with your campaign
• A forecasting feature is available … I doubt that it will be of value. I dont really care about their guesses - in addition, there is no way they can forecast effectiveness of traffic. In general, I think all search users need to focus more on making traffic more effective than making traffic increase
• The output of the forecasting feature is 1. Clicks, 2. Average CPC, 3. Average position (rank), 4. Share of potential clicks
• The forecast period is roughly 30 days, but changeable
• Spending caps - you can set a per day limit, of you can set a campaign limit. Imposing a limit will give more forecasting data
• Fast ad activation - people have been compaining …
• The ads will be online within an hour - “with some exceptions such as gamling” (I didn’t even know that I could purchase gamling terms…)
• Yahoo will still be looking at all ads - simply post-review rather than pre-review (automated review that is…)
• You can rotate different ads. They are calling ads “creatives”. I guess they couldn’t copy all Adwords terms…
• Campaign scheduling - you can, well, schedule a campaign.
• You can not schedule by the hour, or let a campaign focus its exposure at night etc.
• NICE!! The long tail is back in! In the past, Yahoo always removed terms which they had zero clicks on in the past 30 days. That is no longer the truth - they will be allowed
• The new Ad Ranking Model - quality is more important than $ bids
• You will still only pay the minimum needed to stay in your position
• If you are the max bidder, but have the highest quality you will be rewarded with lower CPC
• The reward levels are not linear - it seems to be rather complicated. But you will pay less than the one below you
• Minimum bid levels, the lowest cost available, will remain
• The quality index will NOT include landing pages, so it will probably be based on CTR solely
• Standard and advanced match ads will be mixed in the list, and let the best performance (quality) decide position
• Quality index - looks at CTR, and “other things as well”. They also look at historical data for account and terms. Also, have lots of ads, and let the system optimized and rotate the ad. Also, “relevancy is still king”. This is confusing …
• There will be dynamic keyword insertion in the ads
• How to prepare - check budget, group keywords in groups, use several ads, use dynamic keywords in ads, use negative keywords. In other words, treat Yahoo as you treat Adwords
• Best practices - be comfortable with your maximum bid. It seems like they are really scared of people getting mad about increased spending. I suppose that the system has taken into consideration that Yahoo needs more money, so the overall income might be higher from the newer system. I hope that this means that there will be more value to the advertisers as well…
• Ad testing - keep trying, see what works. Since the system auto optimizes ads, you will be a winner if you have lots of ads.
• Dynamic keyword insertion - in both title and description
• There are limits on negative keywords
• The account pages will be translated to our local language, unless if your are Finnish - then you will get English again
• Panama will be launched in Q2
• USA has upgraded, Japan is next, all European markets will upgrade at the same time

OK - descent presentation. Took a bit more than an hour. In English, from someone who know about the system. The Panama platform should probably not be put down solely because it is a copy of the Adwords system. The Adwords system is good, so a copy is probably a bit better, right? I think that Yahoo’s big issue here in Sweden is more about driving traffic to their web properties.

David