Yahoo

Vinny Lingham’s Blog

The Road Ahead for Yahoo…

I had the privilege of spending 2 days at Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale with about a dozen different product managers, including those from Yahoo Panama (YSM). The entire event was fantastic and gave those of us attending the advisory board, great insights into where Yahoo is heading. I’m obviously under an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), so this post has been reviewed by Yahoo to ensure that it is in compliance with the agreement - although they have had not editorial control over the opinions.

My Top 5 thoughts:

1. I think Yahoo finally gets it! The Peanut Butter Manifesto has sunk in and they’re rationalizing their business in order to create depth of product offering, and not breadth.
2. Panama’s roadmap is looking impressive and although they were slow out the gate, I think it will become a very close competitor to Google Adwords, with the exception of the volume differences in traffic.
3. Yahoo gets “Web Apps“! Some of the new features and enhancements are moving more and more to browser based apps, and away from desktop ones.
4. Affiliates are a key part of Yahoo’s growth plans for the next few years, across all their properties.
5. I see a sense of empowerment within the organisation that hasn’t been there in the past. The groups we chatted with, gave me the impression that there was more under their control now, then in the past and that the winds of change are blowing which is leading to a more aggressive approach by each individual business unit to go out there and get ahead of the market.

Time will tell, but I think Yahoo is well down a path of recovery from the hiccups it has had with Panama just 6 months ago, amongst others.

Yahoo Announces Enterprise Web Services Version 2.0.0

I just received the following email from Yahoo:

Enterprise Web Services Version 2.0.0 Coming Soon

During mid- to late-May, Yahoo! Search Marketing is planning to launch a new version of the Enterprise Web Services (EWS) Marketing API. EWS Version 2.0.0 offers a new service, enhancements to the existing services and data objects, and 13 new reports. Please read this email carefully to understand all of the new features this release provides users like you.

About this Release
EWS Version 2.0.0 will be released to the EWS sandbox and production at the same time in mid- to late-May. At that time, we will also provide documentation about the new version. As with any new version, some features are not backwards-compatible. We suggest that you first experiment with the new version in the EWS sandbox, make any required changes to your client application and test your implementation. Then be ready to switch over to production before the old version is removed. The old version will be available in production for 60 days after the new version is released.

New Features
Here’s a summary of the new features in EWS V.2.0.0.

• Account Data Object: An existing element, vatCode, has been renamed vatRegistrationNumber. The VAT registration number is required for certain markets only.

• Ad Data Object: An existing element, shortDescription , has a new restriction. This element is now required.

• AccountService: A new parameter has been added to the addAccount operation, accountDailySpendLimit. Use this parameter to set the daily spend limit when creating a new account.

• AdService: A new operation has been added to the AdService, setAdUrl. Use this operation to conveniently change the URL for the ad.

• BidInformationService: Two new operations have been added to the BidInformationService, getMarketBidsForBestRank and getMinBidForKeywordString. The getMarketBidsForBestRank operation returns the highest and lowest keyword bid for a given ad group in a given market. The getMinBidForKeywordString operation returns the minimum bid for the specific keyword.

• CompanyService: A new service has been added to the Marketing API, CompanyService. This service returns information about a company.

• KeywordResearchService: Two new operations have been added to the KeywordResearchService, getCanonicalKeywords and getCommonKeywords. The getCanonicalKeywords operation returns the exact-canon form of a keyword for a given set of keywords. The getCommonKeywords operation returns the most popular phrase for a given set of keywords.

• KeywordService: A new operation has been added to the KeywordService, setKeywordUrl. Use this operation to conveniently change the URL for the keyword.

• MasterAccount Data Object: A new element has been added to the MasterAccount data object, marketID. Now you can use this element to access the marketID from either the MasterAccount object or the Account object.

• MasterAccountService: A new parameter has been added to the addNewCustomer operation, company . Use this parameter to provide company information for the new customer.

• RelatedKeywordRequestType Data Object: A new element has been added to the RelatedKeywordRequestType data object, offset. Use this element to specify the starting point for the next set of keywords.

New Reports
Additionally, we have added some new reports to the Marketing API. The majority of these are “ByDay” reports that aggregate data by day (rather than by reporting period). Another report, the BillingTransactionDetail report, provides information about billing transactions. We invite you to check out and use these new reports to take advantage of the more specific account data that is now at your fingertips.

What I really like is the KeywordResearchService call - something that is sorely missing from Google. This will be great for keyword research!

Yahoo! announces Affiliate Advisory Board

I’m very pleased to be able to be the first to announce that Yahoo! has established an Affiliate Advisory Board and has invited me to sit on this newly formed Board that will deal with issues related to affiliate marketing for Yahoo!, across the company. The Affiliate Advisory will be meeting in May, as per the invitation:

“The two days will consist of meeting the CJ/Yahoo! Affiliate Team plus top Y! Executives, product discussions from each property included in the Y! Affiliate Program, Panama roundtable session, Yahoo! Developer Network presentation and the future of the Yahoo! Affiliate Program.”

This is a hugely positive move by Yahoo! and kudos to them for driving affiliate marketing into the mainstream online marketing channel. This cements affiliate marketing as one of the key online marketing channels, and for a group the size of Yahoo! to embrace affiliate marketers so closely, it really does show both momentum in this space, as well as recognition of the value that affiliate marketers can offer to both large and small enterprises.

Return on Effort with PPC Campaigns

I has barely finished the eComXpo session and no sooner had James from the InsureMe Blog expanded (stole :-) ) the themes of one of my upcoming blog posts that I was planning! Thanks a lot James! I’m going to write about it anyways!

Basically, James already details what I said during the show, but just to clarify what I mean by Return on Effort, here is my short and simple take on things:

The question was asked as to whether or not it is worth spending time on 2nd tier (non-Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN) search engines and running campaigns with them.

There are a couple of key issues here, one is market growth (momentum) that Google in particular has, and the second is ROE (Return on Effort)
Let’s make the following assumptions for the US market search engine market (taken from VastPlanet):

Google Market Share = 53% (with AOL)
Yahoo Market Share = 28.1%

MSN Market Share = 10.5%

Ask Market Share = 5%

The Total for The Titans is a whopping 96.6%.

Now, until Snap, Become, Miva & all the other 2nd tier engines send traffic out of the massive :- combined 3.4% market share that they have & I can’t see the logic in advertising with them, and here is why:

If in one of our campaigns at Clicks2Customers, we have to allocate a campaign management resource to setup a campaign on a 2nd tier engine (which we don’t deal with). Now let’s assume for a decent sized researched campaign of 5,000 keywords with dedicated ad copy (as all engines are different and have differing editorial rules), it takes them 100 hours to do (and that’s quick, using our technology and existing processes).

Let’s assume that currently on Google, we are running with 50,000 keywords and generating $100k a month in sales and in our category, we’re getting 5.3m impressions (searches) per month. All things being equal, by the ratios above, the maximum searches we would get out of ALL the 2nd tier engines combined, would be 340,000 searches with 50,000 keywords. Let’s further assume that we went with the largest 2nd tier engine (not even sure who that is) and the engine had a 20% market share, then I’m going after a market of 68,000 searches related to my product/service - if you divide that further with the fact that you’re only loading 5,000 keywords - it would get scary, so I will neglect to include this in my calculations.

Again, ceteras paribus, if you just work out the back of the envelope stuff, then the absolute maximum that this traffic is worth to me if it converted even just as well as Google does is $1,283 in sales (which I highly doubt, as there are large amounts of Clicks Fraud on 2nd tiers). And that’s with a 20% market share which is not even possible in such a fragment tail-end market.

So, assuming I could spend my 100 hours on Google, and push my campaign performance up by just 10% with an extra 5,000 keywords, then I would be pushing the needle on my revenues by $10,000 (a nearly 400% increase in ROE), why would I bother with 2nd tier engines? I know the argument (from the 2nd tiers) is that it’s cheaper, etc - but at the end of the day, spending those hours improving clickthrough rates and other metrics like conversions etc, will translate into greater savings anyways on the majors like Google - so I don’t buy that argument.

Most Google PPC campaigns I have seen are not even 50% at peaking in terms of digging into traffic in the long tail, and most people are so worried being on other engines that don’t matter and waste their time there. Mine the Google keyword gold instead, and when you’re finished making triple digit gains, then go visit Yahoo and then MSN, and then finally, Ask.

Lather, rinse & repeat.
Someone today said to me that no one ever made a fortune by worrying about the numbers after the decimal. I think that this definitely holds true in this case.

Yahoo is NOT paying me to say this!

Seriously!  I know I’ve been praising Yahoo this week a bit more often than usual, but I’m so impressed with the new Yahoo Bookmarks, it’s scary! It’s got a really rich and intuitive user experience - and built for speed & performace!!   It’s far better than Del.icio.us in my opinion - by a mile!! However, the question is - what will they do with Del.icio.us now?
Anyways - give it a try and let me know what you think.  This week for me, at least, has been very positive for Yahoo.  Jeremy put it down very well in his blog piece last year on the Ajaxification of Yahoo when he said that “One thing Yahoo has always been good at is brining new technologies to a mainstream audience”.

Kudos to Yahoo for the new and improved Yahoo Bookmarks (and My.Yahoo.Com)!

Vinny Lingham is an International Award winning Entrepreneur & Search Engine Marketer. He is currently CEO of Synthasite, a Web 2.0 Startup.

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