Feedback Loop

Industry insiders size up the new platform

Just before announcing the new Yahoo! search advertising platform in October, we brought some of the top search marketing industry insiders to the Yahoo! Search Marketing HQ in Burbank to show it off. Everyone present seemed to really appreciate all the new features and the easy-to-use slickness of the improved interface. We asked each what they liked best, and here’s what they said:

Catherine Seda
Author of Search Engine Advertising & Entrepreneur Columnist
Of all of the new Yahoo! features, my favorite is the sliding bid bar! You instantly see at what bid range a significant spike in traffic happens. Why bid more if you don’t have to? This tool makes it easy to maximize your traffic potential without over-bidding. I know I’ll be using this feature a lot. And this is the one I’m most excited to show to clients and audiences.

Jennifer Slegg
Contextual Advertising Queen
My favorite new feature is the new slider bar, which makes it easy for advertisers to see the relation between the keyword CPC and the expected clicks and impressions, as well as how many clicks and impressions would be missed. This feature is great for the old-timers who want to see the differences quickly with ease, as well as being a great learning tool for advertisers new to PPC, since they can see how the bid price they choose relates to how much traffic they will receive or miss out on when their ad campaign goes live.

Andy Beal
Internet Marketing Consultant
The launch of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s long-awaited new marketing interface brings with it a host of new features and design elements not found in competing products. There is no doubt that the interactive charts, intelligent keyword selection filters and enhanced traffic forecasting will all play their part in helping advertisers implement and fine-tune their campaigns, but one new feature has the power to completely change the way we calculate the value of paid search advertising…

[It] is the addition of what Yahoo! Search Marketing calls “assists”—keywords that helped to bring the visitor to an advertiser’s web site, even if they didn’t play a role in the final conversion. For years, I’ve been preaching the need for marketers to evaluate and target the full buying cycle and not just the final transaction. Yahoo! is betting that the majority of advertisers are not currently tracking the buying cycle and has introduced “assists” as a way to simplify the process of determining which keywords played an important part in driving the actual sale. By showing these assisting keywords, Yahoo! will add tremendous value to marketers and help them to fully evaluate the benefit of a keyword before making any decision to delete the bid, simply because it doesn’t appear to be “converting.”

As the new interface continues to grow, I expect to see Yahoo! expanding this valuable tool to show marketers how search played a role in the conversion of other marketing channels, too. When we are able to fully assess where and how paid search plays a role in all of our advertising efforts, it will be a huge win for both Yahoo! and marketers!

Greg Sterling
Sterling Market Intelligence
I found the new interface to be much more user-friendly and many of the tools to be much more intuitive. But the thing that was perhaps most interesting to me was the “assists” tracking feature. That capability starts to help marketers gain a holistic view of their campaigns, rather than just clicks and conversions in isolation. We know from consumer research that there’s a much more complicated process going on before the “last click” that leads to a conversion. But there haven’t been good tools to systematically track the relationship between clicks earlier and later in the cycle. There are numerous budget and strategy implications in starting to see consumers’ interactions with search more clearly. This new feature starts to help marketers do that.

In addition, Andrew Goodman and Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media and Barry Schwartz also have good things to say, so check out Traffick and Search Engine Roundtable, respectively.

-Michael Mattis