CogBlog

Yahoo Search Marketing looks like they are moving ever so slightly away from Match Driver.

"To give advertisers more control over their ads, we plan to remove a limited number of keyword mappings on July 29, 2008. "

Match Driver is their system for matching synonyms and plurals of certain phrases together into one bidding group. For instance, if you wanted to bid on the keyword "timeclock" and "time clocks" on YSM, they are lumped together by Match Driver. The system was first introduced by Overture way back in 2002 with the claim that it would help advertisers drive more traffic--by forcing them to bid on synonyms that they may not have wanted in the first place.

The problem with Match Driver is that it has always been a little bit of a black box. Instead of having the ability to choose an easily understood match type like "exact match" (where your ad will only be triggered by a search for exactly your defined key word/phrase) the best you can do with Yahoo is to use their "Standard" match --which will still be matched to multiple phrases through match driver.

This causes all kinds of issues when managing keyword sets across multiple networks as well. For instance, say you have a set of five phrases in Google Adwords, each with their own destination URL, match type, and bid. If you take these phrases and import them into the YSM system they will only accept one of them, and reject the others as duplicates. The one version they accept will be the the one you submitted first, so now you'll be targeting all five phrases with the bid, and destination URL intended for just one. And, since you didn't know their match list prior to submission, it is quite difficult to know precisely which of your submissions will be the accepted version.

You can look at their list of unmapped phrases here:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/developer/index.php

What strikes me about the list is that they are not so much unmapping phrases, as mapping them to a new cononicalized version. For instance, they are taking this set of phrases :

history and automobile
history and of and the and automobile
history automobile
history of an automobile
history of automobile
history of the automobile
history on automobile
history on the automobile

and matching them to the phrase "automobile history" instead of "car history". Not a huge change in my opinion.

When you search Yahoo for "automobile history" and "history of the automobile", you'll get the same set of advertisers -- many of whom are selling used car history reports. So, is it in these advertiser's best interests to force them to use the same bid, ad copy, and destination URL for those two searches? Certainly "history of the automobile" converts at a much, much lower rate. And, notice that on AdWords, where advertisers have more control, those advertisers avoid "history of the automobile", while they do appear for the search "automobile history.

Rather than tweak Match Driver, I've got a much better idea. Get rid of it.