Yahoo Search Marketing just sent out the following email which alerts its advertisers to the changes in bid management from the current ‘auction PPC’ format to the new Yahoo Search Marketing ‘Estimated Average Position’ and Bid Range for Top Positions.’
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Dear Advertiser,As you will soon notice when you log into your Sponsored Search account, we are making some important changes to your Manage Bids page.
In early December 2006, some of the information on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available. We will be removing the “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns from the current account interface. The View Bids tool will also be removed.
These columns will be replaced with two new columns of data:
* Estimated Average Position
This displays an estimate of the average position your listing may achieve, based on your bid and the current bids of other advertisers.Bid Range for Top Positions
This displays the current range of bids other advertisers are willing to pay for the positions at the top of the search results page.
To learn why we’ve made these changes and more, please see our FAQs.Further Questions?
If you have questions, please contact our Customer Solutions department via the Support Request Form or call 866-YAHOO-96 (866-924-6696).Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
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1 response so far ↓
me on Dec 13, 2006 at 8:05 am
What a bunch of maroons… Yahoo has effectively DECREASED the ROI of its advertisers. Here is a copy of a letter going out to clients:
Dear soandso,
I just got done writing a pretty nasty “feedback/suggestions” email to Yahoo! concerning the recent “enhancements” to their advertising platform (= hype). I won’t get into it in great detail in this email but let me try and summarize by telling you that they have taken important insight and control out of the hands of their advertisers and have made it more of a guessing game. The entire reason I used to prefer Yahoo! Search Marketing to Google AdWords was that with Yahoo I didn’t feel like I was “flying so blindly.” Yahoo! has successfully made it more of a guessing game to advertise with them now. I can’t imagine why they would do this but it has been done. Perhaps they think that if advertisers don’t know what to bid, they will bid more out of desperation to be in the top group of advertisers. And I guess to a new advertiser, they won’t be able to contrast their experiences in the new system with the old… Personally, I think this will cost them advertising revenue - at least in the short term.
I now have no hard facts concerning how much to bid to achieve intended results (well, technically I know how much to bid for the number 1 position - the most). All they tell me now is a suggested bid range based on historical bids, whereas before they would show me the bids of the top 5 advertisers, and I could easily see who they were. Technically I can learn who is advertising by going to search.yahoo.com and performing the search for the keyphrase, I could also adjust bids and perform the search again to view the results of that adjustment, but it would take A LOT more time to conduct that aspect of my normal research and would be completely inefficient and costly.
If you approached me today with the desire to launch a PPC campaign, I would have to now push you towards doing so with/in Google vs. Yahoo! - if the desire was exposure in the major search engines. There are other advertising solutions that service a smaller audience - like Mamma.com, etc. The reason I didn’t use Google much before was the exact same reason - I felt I was flying blindly when advertising with them… and now that I have the same experience with both Yahoo! and Google I would rather fly blindly with Google.
I just wanted to bring this to your attention because it will effect your advertising campaign. We won’t be able to be so exacting and educated in our bids/adjustments. To me this means that your ROI will be effected in an adverse way.
Sorry to bring news like this to you but you needed to know, and you certainly have an option of setting up a campaign with Google if you want. It wouldn’t take the same amount of setup time/costs that it took with Yahoo! because the research and ad copy writing has been done. All that would be needed would be account and ad creation using the same (or similar) terms and ad copy used for the Yahoo! PPC Campaign. Let me know if you are interested in pursuing an account with/in Google AdWords.
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