CogBlog

A few months back Yahoo launched Panama, their long awaited update to their sponsored search management tool. And, while I think most would agree that it is an improvement over the old system, they did not address a few critical areas.

So Yahoo!, for your own good, and mine, grant me these three wishes:


1. Get rid of "match driver".
Six years ago GoTo.com, Yahoo Search Marketing's ancestor, dominated the Sponsored Search market. At the time, there was no AdWords. Their closest competitor was FindWhat (now Miva). Yahoo, MSN, AOL all distributed GoTo search listings. Feeling their power, GoTo decided it would be a good idea to artificially boost the number of competitors for each particular term by consolidating like terms together into one bidding pool.

Here's how they described it:

"Our Match Driver tool takes search term misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations, and maps them to a primary term so that consumers get the best and most comprehensive search results we can offer."

See, they were really looking out for the consumers. They also did this favor to advertisers:

"In order to maintain your competitive advantage in the search results, we take your highest bid on any form of a primary search term. You therefore need not bid on multiple versions of mapped search terms in the future. Any given search term can be listed only once per advertiser, so we removed all duplicates and retained only one of each term."

This could alternatively be read as "We've now forced you to pay a higher amount than what would otherwise be warranted for less desirable terms that we've pooled together with other more valuable terms. If you want to be competitive with the valuable terms, you'll have to pay for our other junk as well".

There was of course a lot of dis-satisfaction with this decision at the time in the still relatively small Search Marketing world. What GoTo was trying to do was drive up their average revenue per click to attract more potential distribution partners.

Times have changed, but this bad idea hasn't. It still sucks. Jerry, it's time to ditch it.


2. Give me an Adwords Editor for Yahoo.
One of the things that we hoped for most in the new Panama system was that the campaign management interface would be improved. And, to give them credit, it has improved over the old system. They did finally do away with the notion that each keyword had to be associated with its own creative and moved to a more AdWords-esque model where you can associate creative (ads) with groups of keywords.

But, in the meantime, Google has come out with something absolutely fantastic--an offline account editing application. This tool allows you to download a snapshot of your account to your local machine, then very quickly execute thousands of changes. Cut, paste, search, replace. I love it. And, I love how Google took the almost counter-intuitive step of building a desktop app as an upgrade for their online platform.

So, Yahoo, take a look at the AdWords editor and try to make managing very large campaigns through your system as easy as it is now with Google.


3. Let me opt-out of specific partners.
This is really a pet peeve. With Yahoo, you can't opt out of specific publishing partners--even if you absolutely know that they never, ever, result in quality traffic.

We have a nice little ROI tracking tool we first built about 7 years ago. I keep thinking that with all the great analytics platforms out there, we'll eventually retire this. But, it is hard to beat having direct access to the raw data when you are doing an analysis. So, it lives on. One very handy component is the ability to identify the referring URLs from any particular campaign. So, using this, we can easily see the conversion rates for Yahoo publishing partners.

For instance, the site BlurtIt is a Yahoo search publishing partner. It is similar to Yahoo answers (but not as good). Every month, Yahoo delivers (and charges us for) traffic from BlurtIt, and every month that traffic immediately hits the back button upon arriving at our client's sites. Eliminating that traffic would instantly improve the ROI of our overall Yahoo campaign. But, it can't be done. Why is that? I'm sure they are sick of hearing this but... Google lets me do it.


What these three wishes really boil down to is this: Yahoo, change your mindset from one of fear that giving your advertisers total control over their campaigns will cost you revenue, to one where you are helping advertisers find profitable marketing relationships, and avoiding those that are not profitable. Trying to hang on to marketing dollars by giving clients fewer options is just not going to work.

So, c'mon Yahoo, grant me some wishes.