Notes from the New Yahoo Search Ad Platform Presentation at SES San Jose
Yahoo sponsored a lunch-and-learn type session at Search Engine Strategies San Jose where they revealed a demo of the new "Panama" ad platform. My overall impression is that it is Google AdWords in a snazzier outfit, but the snazzy stuff is noteworthy, so here is a summary of my notes from the session.
First off, the new platform's interface (we will call it Panama for ease of typing) can be customized to from basic to complex - so you can make the platform fit your needs - a big improvement.
The folks over at Yahoo! have also decided to change the focus/mindset when they were designing Panama. Here are the from-to's they presented:
From search listing focused to marketing focused
From auction focused to managing objective focused
From early adopter focused to multiple segment focused
From quality through manual review to quality through technology
Panama will also bring a change of terminology...here is that list:
From "keywords" to "targets"
From "creative" to "rich media"
From "calls to action" to "phone calls"? (not sure if this is right...just copying my notes here.)
The next part of the presentation ran us through the 5 steps of campaign creation in Panama. Here they are:
- Set a Geographic Target - state and DMA based. Has a very cool graphical interface that shows you where on the map your selected area is.
- Create an AdGroup - you heard it right, they are calling them AdGroups. This is also where you set sponsored and content match.
- Choose Your Keywords - Panama provides tools that will crawl you landing page and suggest keywords. Also it uses a collaborative filter to easily create keyword lists.
- Pricing - here is where you set your cost-per-click. The cool part of this is a bar graph with a slider that lets you see what happens to your volume as your bid goes up. I am not really sure how this fits with the click-through-rate part of the model.
- Create an Ad - This part looks the same but you can do A/B testing, which is awesome.
After those steps you review everything (twice) and then you make it live. It is a very good looking interface, and as long as it works consistently, it will be an improvement.
There is also a new control panel dashboard - this will provide you with customizable alerts (think - if my position for this keyword goes below 5, alert me).
Also notable is the ability to set a CPA through the system - this will help control your bids to reach your cost-per-acquisition goals...very cool.
It does sound like there will be some rough edges in the transfer from DTC to Panama. It sounds like any ad with custom copy (a best practice) will be migrated into its own AdGroup. What does that mean? In a large Panama account you might end up with hundreds of AdGroups...ouch.
The timeline is to get the interface out in Q4 and the CTR part of the model out in Q1 (possibly Q4).
Anyway, that is a rough overview. If you have questions, please post a comment and I will tell you what I know.
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Comments
Hi James. Thanks for the info from the conference. Did you hear anything from Yahoo about implementing a quality score similar to Google's recent changes during the Panama update? Thanks.
Posted by: Chuck | August 15, 2006 08:52 PM
Hey Chuck! Thanks for the comment.
Yahoo said that the Google-esque "quality score" would likely come in Q1 2007. That is, unless they can get it working prior to that - then it will come out in Q4 2006.
They did poll the audience to see if we wanted Yahoo! to wait for rollout until after the holidays. I was surprised to see that about 60% of the people in the room wanted it Q4, not Q1.
Hope that helps. :)
Posted by: James Omdahl | August 15, 2006 09:52 PM