Archive for October, 2007

Beyond Feeling Lucky

New Yahoo! Search Gets Prospects Closer to Done

Ever heard the expression, “How do we get to yes on this?” It’s the modern version of the old used car salesman question, “What do I have to do to get you into this car?” except without the loud suit.

At Yahoo! we’re all about the “getting to yes” thing. And here at Search Marketing, we try our level best to help our advertisers get their prospects to yes every day.

But consumers see it a little differently. What consumers—your prospects—want when they search is to get it done. When users search, they usually have a task in mind that they want to get done and as quickly and painlessly possible, though sometimes they’re not sure how to get there.

Enter Search Assist. It’s a new feature on Yahoo.com that intelligently assists searchers, helping them get to “to done” in one search. When a user begins to type in a query and has difficulty, Search Assist is activated and anticipates where the user is likely trying to go, and automatically offers a selection of search term suggestions and related concepts to the query. The user can then select the search term or concept that most closely matches his or her needs, or continue to type the query.

Often, people will begin a search with only a partial idea of the language they need to use to find what it is they want. Search Assist works on the fly, inferring the user’s intent and offering search suggestions.

For example, a search for “vans” may yield “vans shoes,” “vans warped tour,” and “used vans” as suggestions —that’s three very different uses of the word “vans.” Related concepts may present “skate parks” and “apparel” as options.

So what’s in it for you, the advertiser? Well, if users get what they want faster and what they want happens to be what you’re advertising… Well, you don’t have to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve to figure it out.

—Michael Mattis

Driving Traffic Quality

A Roundup of Our Latest Efforts

Quality traffic.

For you, the advertiser, this means qualified clicks from users most likely to become customers. As a part of our ongoing effort to improve the quality of the network and your traffic, we have undertaken several initiatives. The newest of these is a feature called “Blocked Domains,” which allows you to specify certain sites in our partner distribution network on which you do not want your ads to appear.

The new Blocked Domains feature, which launches later this month, is just the latest among several initiatives we are undertaking in order to in order to provide increased value. Others include:

Discounts
You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.

Click protection
We have installed a system to track and identify clicks that we believe shouldn’t be billed to our advertisers.

Intercontinental traffic control
“Blocked Continents,” a recent enhancement, automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, however, you can easily change this setting by going into your Administration tab and clicking “Account General Information.”

To learn more about what we’re doing around network quality, I invite you to visit our new Traffic Quality Center.

—Reggie Davis, Vice President, Network Quality

Photo courtesy rrazor, via Flickr

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