yahoo still doesn’t get it even with panama
May 8, 2007 – 10:48 amI am fairly experienced with SEM having managed grown an SEM budget from $100 a day a few years ago to hundreds of thousands dollars a month across every conceivable search engine and contextual platform from Google to Kanoodle and everything in between.
Because of the size of their traffic - the two most important SEM platforms are Google and Yahoo. And historically Google’s adwords system blew the doors off of Yahoo’s old, out-dated overture based system. Google offered an easy to use but sophisticated platform that would allow me to get a new campaign up and running in minutes (and earning money for Google), while Yahoo’s out-dated overture platform was clunky, slow and required HUMAN approval which could literally take 2-3 weeks to get a new campaign or ad approved. This created 2 huge issues - Yahoo was leaving huge amounts of money (likely hundreds and millions of dollars - how do you like them apples yahoo shareholders?) by not running ads while google was running the same ad because yahoo was too damn slow in approving ads and second optimization of ads was next to impossible on yahoo because it making changes was too painful in terms of time to make it worthwhile. And in fairness - the new panama platform was built to addresss both issues which from my playing around seems to have solved.
BUT and there’s a HUGE but here… Yahoo still doesn’t get it. Yahoo unfortunately still charges a minimum cpc of 10 cents. Whereas up in Mountain View, Google charges as little as a 1 cent for a cpc. I am sure some of you are saying - yahoo’s smart for charging a higher price because that means more money. Wrong. What it does is that it limits the words that someone can advertise on yahoo around - goodbye long tail of keyword’s (kw’s). The more kw’s you use in a search campaign the lower value those outlying kw’s have to you. And unless your making more money then the kw is costing you, then you won’t use it. And so Yahoo artificially limits the amount of kw’s an advertiser will be willing to bid on if they had no minimum bid. So until Yahoo truly embraces the lessons of Google’s advertising system, it is pretty easy to say Yahoo just doesn’t get it yet.
