Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Yaho0! and Twitter team up; advertising is good; ad groups 101; Yahoo’s head of search on the Microsoft alliance, and more

Yahoo! gets all Twitterpated
Last night we announced a new partnership with Twitter that integrates Twitter’s real-time social experiences with Yahoo’s global network of more than 600 million users. Together with the recently announced Facebook integration, this relationship is a key part of advancing our social strategy, transforming Yahoo! into a highly customizable social experience that lets people unify their activity from their many social experiences across the Web. Good for users. Great for advertisers. For more details, head on over to Yodel Anecdotal.

Affiliates beware: Cali sales tax looming
Many search and display advertiser run affiliate networks, whereby they become the middle-men between consumers and suppliers. It’s a good business and one that provides an essential service. But the State of California is considering imposing a sales tax on affiliate sites that have suppliers in the state. While aimed at the big boys like Amazon.com and Overstock.com, the law could affect any affiliate site with relationships in the Golden State. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Said explains.

Online ads help shoppers save
Advertising is often taken to the pillory for being self-serving. That’s just not fair. Good advertising serves an essential need in society. Without it, how would you know that there’s a better—or cheaper—mousetrap out there? eMarketer explains how online advertising is helping consumers save cash in tough times.

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Buying Time

Case Study: Digital media agency Sitewire wields the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Tool to cut its campaign management workload by a factor of ten

In the decade or so since its invention, untold numbers of businesses large and small have taken advantage of pay-per click advertising to generate more website visits and sales. Unfortunately, these companies sometimes found themselves to be victims of their own success: Having experienced good results with paid search marketing, they broadened their keyword lists and campaigns, only to find them increasingly difficult and time-consuming to effectively manage.

Sitewire, a digital media agency based in Tempe, Arizona, found itself as part of the group of companies carrying this “mixed bag.” It initially managed the Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns of its many clients, including the Darden Restaurant Group (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, etc.), via the import campaign feature available to all advertisers. While the performance of the campaigns was generally good, as more keywords, ad copy versions, landing page URLs and targeting parameters were added, using the Sponsored Search interface became increasingly time-consuming and prone to errors.

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What Do I Do With All This Data?

Yahoo’s Scott Burke answers your questions

It’s a pretty common question among online advertisers: How do I use all the marketing metrics I’m inundated with? In an article posted yesterday on Ad Age, Scott Burke, our VP of engineering, user data and analytics, tackles that question with some pretty detailed answers, and talks about what’s important now—whether it’s clicks, time spent, the delta between search and display analytics, and much more. Click over to Ad Age for all the details.

—The Team

(Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr CC 2.0)

Is Your Site Invisible?

Easy ways to determine if search engines can find your site

If search engines can’t find your site, it may as well be the Invisible Man. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing and others are often a primary source of traffic and determine your ranking. Unfortunately, publishing your files to the Internet does not guarantee that the search engines are going to find them. 

Search engines crawl the Web, indexing pages and following links to find more pages. That’s their job. Pages that are newly published can appear in a search engine’s index (and in search results) within minutes, but sometimes it takes hours or even days.

This article will help you to get an idea of whether the search engines are finding your site, and what they see. In the examples below we’ll look at Yahoo!, Google and Bing, the three search engines with the highest market share in the U.S.

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Catch the Revenue Wave

Ecosystem 2.0 conference explores profiting from interactivity

All the big names in online advertising are surfing to Southern California for Ecosystem 2.0, which this year is focused on the theme of “Revenue: The Next Wave.” The annual conference brings together the smartest and most influential of online advertising’s kahunas, so naturally Yahoo! will be there hanging ten when it kicks off on Sunday, Feb. 21.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the event’s main sponsor, says the focus will be on figuring out how to deliver on the profit potential promised by interactivity.

Award-winning event
We’re particularly proud that Yahoo! is receiving the award for “Most Innovative” interactive media sales organization. Seth Dallaire, Yahoo! Vice President of Mid-Market Sales, will accept the honor on behalf of everyone at Yahoo! whose hard work combined inventive ideas about content, advertising solutions and data usage to create new, long-lasting revenue streams for its advertiser and publishing partners.

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New Alliance Heralds New Opportunities

How the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance works for advertisers

Yahoo! and Microsoft have received U.S. and E.U. regulatory clearance for their search transaction. The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will provide a competitive search platform that we believe will drive innovation in search and search advertising, offer a more engaging and personalized experience for consumers, and create greater value for advertisers and publishers. It will not immediately affect your account.

How this benefits you
Once implemented, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will allow advertisers to:

Reach more customers—The alliance will help you reach up to 150 million searchers and get approximately 62 percent more search volume* than on Yahoo! alone through a new, unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks. We’ll continue to innovate and enhance the search experience on our leading Web properties, driving even more search volume. (more…)

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Advertising beyond the Super Bowl;  does social really sell?; Right Media’s future, and more

Advertising the Super Bowl, and beyond
Mitch Spolan, our VP of North American field sales, has just posted a point-of-view commentary on MediaPost, on how digital advertisers are seeing gold in big-ticket events like the Super Bowl, which have traditionally been dominated by TV, radio and print. “Cultural events like the Super Bowl still matter,” says Mitch. “The good news for online marketers is that people are increasingly turning to the Internet for coverage of these events, and audience size and engagement is beginning to reach—and sometimes exceed—that of the original broadcast.” That goes whether you’re a search or display advertiser. To see how advertisers are making the shift online and get some tips for yourself, click over to MediaPost.

Social’s fine, but does it sell?
With all the hype around social media marketing and how it’s good for your brand and customer support, the question arises, “Fine, but does it sell?” AdWeek’s Brian Morrisey asks that question, and adds, “What’s a Facebook friend worth?” He answers with two telling case studies.

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Search Innovation in Five Minutes

SearchSpeak 2010 video spolights Yahoo! search initiatives

Earlier this week we blogged about SearchSpeak 2010, an event that took place at our Sunnyvale campus. At SearchSpeak, some of the smartest and savviest Big Cheeses at Yahoo! took folks through the search and search marketing innovations we’ve introduced over the past six months, and some of the innovations we’re working on for the future. This short video provides a synopsis of the coolest things that are going on here at Yahoo!

For more, visit the Yahoo! Search blog.

—The Team

Speaking of Search

Yahoo! media event spotlights search innovation

Because we’re constantly working to make the search experience more relevant, we also want the world to understand what we’re up to in the search business. That’s why today we hosted a media event, SearchSpeak 2010, to help the media know what’s going on.

The event, at our Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters, featured our new senior VP of search products, Shashi Seth, David Pann, VP of search advertising, and a slew of other executives. Shashi told the audience about consumer search innovations, and talked about the importance of search to Yahoo!, even in light of our potential partnership with Microsoft. “Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future,” Shashi said. “We’ll continue to drive innovation. It’s our stake in the ground.”

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Ad News and Views from Around the Web

New Yahoo! Mobile blog; making the Internet safer; digital marketing trends for 2010, and more

Yahoo! Mobile blog launches
If you read Paul Cushman’s excellent entry “Demystifying Mobile, Part I” on the Yahoo! Advertising blog yesterday, you’re probably interested in mobile marketing. Well now there’s a new Yahoo! blog just for you. The Yahoo! Mobile blog will cover all aspects of mobile marketing, including case studies, new Yahoo! mobile features and products, and industry trends. Check out the La Quinta case study and see how you, too can up your mobile marketing ROI.

Safer Internet day
Safety first, right? On February 9, people and organizations around the world—including Yahoo!—took a moment to recognize the importance of safety on the Web. Visit Yodel Anecdotal to learn more.

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