The Year in Review

One Wild Ride

One of my favorite scenes in all of filmdom is Bette Davis’s famous quip from “All About Eve,” “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” Well, it’s been one heck of a bumpy year—but mostly in a good way. There have been a lot of changes, both within Yahoo! Search Marketing and in the online advertising industry as a whole.

In the last year, we’ve published tons of material designed to help you get the most out of all the “Panama” changes, new product releases and updates. Along the way we have introduced you to a cast of characters from inside Yahoo! and beyond—and had a lot of fun along the way.

Here’s a quick recap of some of 2007’s top posts from this blog.

Tips, How-To’s and How-Not-To’s
For starters, in the past year we’ve helped you understand how bids and budgets work, what your quality index can tell you, and how to enjoy the joys of geo-targeting (Part I and Part II). We’ve also offered tips on how to avoid taking the bait when lured by a “phishing” scam, how to use the handy Insert Keyword feature to help you improve your ad quality, showed that proper punctuation really does count, and finally answered the burning question, “Advanced or Standard match?” Meanwhile, the redoubtable Stephanie Bilberry has helped you track your conversions, use Yahoo! Search Submit to enhance your ad campaigns (with the help of Spider Man), and laid down the law on how to set your limits.

And we also caught that sneaky little Acro-Gnome trying to confuse you with his acronyms.

Quality Counts
You know that quality counts. You know that improving the quality of your ads can lead to a better quality index, and that can lead to better ad placements at lower cost. You know that your quality index is based on an ad’s click-through rate compared to its average position in search results, as well as to that of other ads displayed at the same time, other keywords in your ad group, and other relevance factors. (And that it has nothing to do with the quality of the goods and services you sell or your conversion rate, right?)

Anyway, we employed a lot of pixels explaining your quality index and how you can improve it. In fact, Michael Egan, our senior director of content solutions, wrote a whole series about it (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV). Heck, we even elected a VP of Network Quality and opened a Network Quality Center.

New and Improved
It’s also been a bumper-crop year for updates and enhancements. Over the past 12 months, we’ve allowed you to tune up your campaigns, made your tools more flexible, offered a great many new options, opened new locks in “Panama,” and offered new features to help you write better quality ads, to name just a few. 

Be Our Guest
We’re the first to admit we’re not the only search marketing and online business gurus around. Hardly, in fact. So in 2007 we recruited some of the top minds in the business to help make you a success. Single Throw’s Larry Bailin showed us how to get social, Didit’s Abe Mezrich helped us understand the symbiosis between search and display advertising, iProspect’s Robert Murray demonstrated the importance of integrating your offline and online campaigns and Gerry Bavarro, also from Didit, confirmed that while curiosity may indeed have killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought him back.

Nose for News
We’ve also kept up on the latest news from inside Yahoo! We’ve brought you a wacky contest with a wild prize, showed off our new but experienced management and walked a crooked mile to make you smile. We tried to get our message out every way we could. We even sent you a telegram.

Random Sampling
Finally, we had some fun, offering up post-modern words for your cutting edge vocabulary, introducing you to our new mystery man on the boards, YahooPete (who is he really?) and even divulged some ancient Chinese secrets.

Happy New Year… and you may want to fasten your seatbelts even tighter in ’08.

—The Team