The Way from San Jose

A Recap of Yahoo! at SES San Jose 2007

Last week San Jose (OK, the San Jose Convention Center) was transformed into the nexus of all the latest innovations, strategies and products in the search marketing industry. Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo (SES) proved to be an exciting conference—with practical takeaways for everybody from key search marketing industry experts to folks just starting out with their search marketing campaigns.

Didn’t attend or maybe you did attend and were a bit overwhelmed? No worries. Here are a few session highlights for y’all.

Ads In A Quality Score World
David Pann, vice president, marketplace design and matching, Yahoo! Search Marketing, revealed enhancements to Yahoo! Search Marketing. The new features include:

• PayPal payment integration
• Enhancements to the process for creating an ad
• Low quality index alert—advertisers will be alerted if their ads’ quality index scores drop below certain levels.

When asked about how advertisers can help themselves achieve higher ad quality, David responded, “Testing! We’re trying to drive the maximum relevance to our users. We have been improving this since we launched Panama and we are constantly evolving. The key thing is to drive quality—a good quality experience for the user and the advertiser.”

For more information check out our interactive ad testing tutorial.

Search Engines on Click Fraud
In this session, Reggie Davis, VP, marketplace quality, Yahoo! Search Marketing, summed it up succinctly with, “ad quality + traffic quality = marketplace quality.”

Reggie also talked about the recent launch of the Traffic Quality Center and three goals to which Yahoo! Search Marketing is dedicated:

• Improving communication
• Increasing transparency
• Providing advertisers control

“We have removed poorly performing traffic sources from the network, and we’re being forthcoming with our filtering,” Reggie added, regarding Yahoo! Search Marketing’s commitment to working with our partners to provide more transparency.

Here’s some more info on the launch of our Traffic Quality Center:

Search APIs
Yahoo!’s Managing Director of Sales Technology, Dan Boberg, was one of the panelists, and talked about three of our API Programs: Developer API, Advertiser API and Commercial API.

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a new Commercial API program, which provides free and open access to our APIs, and offers optional fee-based services, including higher level technical support, product roadmap visibility and joint-marketing opportunities. For more on Yahoo! APIs, we’ve posted a helpful article here. For more information on the API programs, check out this post. 

“Mastering Panama” report by Mona Elessiely – Yahoo! Book Party
Author and search marketer Mona Elessiely was also at SES promoting the launch of her new report, Mastering Panama: A Special Report on Yahoo!’s New Search Marketing Platform.

The book is a handy reference guide to a host of the features offered in our Panama system. For more coverage on Mona’s book click here.

Here’s some more on SES San Jose:

• SES San Jose Blog.
• Online influencer and industry blogger Barry Schwartz’s SES coverage wrap up.

—Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications