Ad News and View from Around the Web

Yahoo! front page success; improving your search performanceYahoo! (still) hearts creatives; holiday sales success, and more

Time spent on Yahoo! front page up 20 percent since redesign
Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch reports from Yahoo! Analyst Day on the success of our new front page. Writes Schonfeld: “Senior vice president Tapan Bhat gave an overview of how the redesigned homepage is performing. In the past three months, pageviews are up 9 percent, and time spent on the homepage is up 20 percent…  Some of the big drivers of user engagement come from the ability to customize the homepage by adding applications and feeds from anywhere on the Web into the My Favorites column on the left-hand side. According to Yahoo consumer surveys, 75 percent of users love the applications area and 40 percent are using between 6 to 11 apps. Usage of that feature is up 8 percent over the past three months.” Not bad, if you did say so ourselves.

Improving your search performance
Thinking ahead to 2010, Search Engine Land’s Michelle Stern says that you, the B2B marketer, can improve your search results next year by following three relatively simple rules.

“Yahoo! Hearts Creatives” video a hit
We do indeed speak your language, agency creatives. A few weeks ago we unleashed the Yahoo! Hearts Creatives video—originally created as an in-house marketing vehicle—on the general agency public. Since then, it’s gotten rave reviews and is appearing embedded on sites all over. Check out some of the comments, and feel free to leave one of your own. Meanwhile, a Leo Burnett exec asks, “is strategy the new creative?.”

Holiday sales success secrets
Sometimes, you don’t realize the truth of an obvious bit of advice until it’s put in front of you—you know, one of those “I should have thought of that” moments. Last week we posted five tips and tricks for making your holiday season successful in a tough economy based on Yahoo! research. Nothing groundbreaking here, just common sense you don’t realize is common until someone mentions it.

Tips for using Yahoo! Site Explorer
ClickZ’s Erik Dafforn, offers several tips on Yahoo! Site Explorer, a comprehensive set of tools that help you, for starters, explore all the Web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You might want to put your propeller beanie on for this one. To explore Explorer, explore here.

Five ways to optimize your Facebook marketing
While everyone’s whining about the new Facebook look and feel, marketers should take a second to look at Daniel Flamberg’s post over at iMedia Connection. For marketers, says Flamberg, “Facebook isn’t a cakewalk.” He then offers five solid tips on how to make the best of it.