There have been lots of announcements coming from Google lately, as usual.   Incidentally, you can get a ton of good news about Google and Google AdWords, by simply setting up an alert for “google” and “adwords.”   I usually start out my day browsing the latest news about them and Yahoo!, as well as cruising the blogosphere.   Here’re a few Google announcements I’ve encountered over the past week:

1. Google is investing in Pixazza.   This is a startup company that enables web publishers to receive revenue by including advertisements on images in their sites.   Pixazza allows site visitors to see products displayed inside larger images that are available for purchase.   The buzz is this could be an AdSense-for-images type venture.   AdSense has been huge for Google.   This and using links to determine rankings were the two big things Google has come up with that have made the company huge (besides giving the company the name “Google” – so I guess that’s three big things if you want to count that).   It makes sense that they’d continue their quest to make the Internet more of an ad-based medium with images.

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I’ve been having so many problems with Yahoo! Search Marketing lately, that I thought it’s time to post some of these. YSM is generally a decent program to work with, but they need to start doing some things and stop doing others if they want a product that’s competitive with Google AdWords. Consider this post a plea for Yahoo to continue to improve the organization supporting their search marketing.

Here are the problems I’ve had with Yahoo!:

1. YSM editors will rewrite ads for your account and upload them. They do their own optimization without asking. Supposedly, I should have received a notification that this was happening, but come on? Editing ads without express approval from the owner of the account?

2. A Yahoo! “leak” onto the content network. Last month, paused campaigns started showing ads. A Yahoo! Rep described it as a “leak in their back-end.” The “leak in their back-end” wasted money (they’re doing the right thing and refunding it), causing the account to hit budget limits and shut off early in the day, preventing productive ads from showing. Besides the direct costs of the paused campaigns showing ads, there was the opportunity cost from the good ads not showing.

As far as I’m concerned, YSM owes me big time for setting a reasonable budget to limit the insanity, otherwise they would have had to refund a lot more money than what they’re refunding now. This mistake in their system probably could have cost somewhere in the 10′s of thousands for them just for this account if I wasn’t experienced with using their system.

3. I can’t wait for a YSM desktop editor…with clearly articulated account limits.

Poorly defined limits on bulk uploads and downloads through their console. After making a few changes through the Yahoo! console it sometimes freezes up, not allowing me to download or upload changes because I’ve hit my limit for the day. Without a lot of advanced planning, extended roll outs, or use of an API (which also has limits), Yahoo effectively makes it impossible to edit large accounts. YSM reps say they can’t help with this one.

4. YSM’s minimum bidding system is causing less relevant ads to show for a major keyword for the account.

I manage an account with very similar ads and keywords. Basically, they run the same ads across ad groups except for small changes in titles. One ad group doesn’t have a high enough bid to show ads for a particular keyword, but a bunch of other ad groups will show ads for that very same keyword through advanced match, even though bids are set at 1/2 what the minimum bid is listed to be for this keyword.

Worse yet, these ads are sometimes specialized to a particular state and the keyword is not state-specific. I consider it a flaw in their system that it will show advanced matched ads for a keyword that’s listed as inactive in the ad group that is bidding on it directly.

So there you go. That’s one week of problems with Yahoo!! (two exclamations, one for Yahoo!, one for the end of the sentence).

Let’s pretend Google provided Car Service. Say you needed an oil change for your car, so you head over to GoogleMart’s   automotive department.   You walk in and check out their prices, and the board says:

Standard Oil Change

Minimum Price $20

“What the heck does that mean?”   You ask the kid across the counter.   He tells you that the price listed is the least you’ll be charged for an oil change, although that price might vary.

Then he asks, “What’s the most you’re willing to pay to get your oil changed?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

The kid responds, “The GoogleMart automotive department must charge at least the minimum price for you to get an oil change, but we will charge you no more than the most you’re willing to pay.   If the most you’re willing to pay is below the minimum price, we’re not going to change your oil, but you only pay anything if we actually change your oil.   How much you’re charged depends on how much other people wanting an oil change are willing to pay.   The more you’re willing to pay, the faster you’ll get your oil changed.”

Huh. The days of “I want an oil change – here’s fifteen bucks,” are clearly over.

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Most of my blog posts don’t get many hits. It’s not that surprising; I don’t really spend much time being thorough with the information I write about because I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write a post. I do try to be original, so I’m not repeating the same stuff everyone else is writing, but I just don’t explain every little thing and tend to glance over big topics. Well, I’m pretty bogged down with other things to do for work, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for pointers. Something light, fast, interesting; something to get me more hits than usual. What better place to look than a search engine for clues? So I was doing some work and snagged a snapshot of Yahoo’s home page from the olympics:

whaaa . . . Gangsta synchronized swimmers!!! DO elephants hold grudges . . . even long term grudges!?! OF COURSE I WANT TO SEE WORST DRESSED CELEBRITIES!!!!!!!!

Well there you go, it doesn’t get anymore compelling than that. It’s a slam dunk for Yahoo. So here I am, Steve L, your average Joe Blogger, how can I put to work the methodology of Yahoo! to generate traffic for my own blog post?

Well, I feel like I’m on the shoulders of giants now, and for this post, I’d like to share with you a very special, very secret Google document I found. Tucked away in Google’s “Webmaster Guidelines” section, there’s an article explaining how webmasters can get a number 1 page ranking on Google. Not only that, Google leaked a document detailing the formula behind the search engine.

And if that’s not enough, you can see former Google spokesperson, Vanessa Fox, nude.

And, finally, here’s a picture of me, worst hair in the internet marketing industry, probably the worst dressed as well, but it’s hard to tell from the photo:

Yahoo! recently announced that they are going to display Google AdWords ads for some of their queries. If you read a lot about internet marketing, you’ll see that the popular angle towards explaining the extra revenue Yahoo! will generate from such a move is AdWords has greater relevance in ad distribution. I don’t think that’s the primary reason why Yahoo! will make more, and if it was, it’s bad news for Yahoo!. I’d count that as a vote of no confidence for their new Panama system, and that fact could be more damaging to their reputation than an extra $250 million in revenue is worth.

It’s true that Google provides more match types, better negative matching, more location targeting, and apparently less spammy search partners. When I manage ads on AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing for the same company, I typically expect better conversion rates on Google than on Yahoo!. But I also allow for a higher cost per conversion on AdWords. Getting more traffic, more exposure on first page results, itself has value to the companies I manage. These companies are less concerned with YSM. This pushes more budget into Google AdWords, regardless of the cost to generate direct business. The reasons I think why Yahoo! will generate more revenue by using AdWords’ distribution are:

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I’ve been doing a search engine optimization for a few years, and I don’t really think there’s much difference between the major search engines. There might be some little differences, most noticeably:

• MSN still displays very spammy pages every once in a while.
• Google updates some pages faster and makes an effort to find breaking news/content.
• Google gets a lot of pages in its index.

A little less noticeably:

• Google puts huge emphasis on links and link quality.
• It’s possible to get new pages with a lot of new links to the top of MSN fast.
• Yahoo! might put a bit more emphasis on “on-the-page” content than the other engines.

Overall though, I think the major search engines rank really similar pages. And I think that optimization efforts that are good for one engine, generally work for the others.

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The Google AdWords editor makes edits based on search criteria and performance factors easy. When managing accounts, I use it fairly regularly to change display URLs, destination URLs, and bids. Occasionally I might also use cut and paste to rearrange elements of an account. Most of these changes are driven by the advanced search feature. Here are a couple examples of advanced edits in action.

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I’ve read in places about display URLs affecting quality scores. However, the discussion always surrounded around how a display URL affects the clickthrough rate of an ad, which in turn, is used to calculate quality. The relationship was presented as an indirect one. Anyone interested in knowing the nitty-gritty of quality scores will be interested in knowing that there is also a direct relationship between quality scores and display URLs. This fact popped up when I noticed that one of my favorite AdWords help pages was recently edited. The help page discusses the factors that go into the different quality scores Google uses, and it has two points added. First for calculating a keywords minimum bid, it states that one factor is “the historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group.” Second for a keyword’s ad position it also states that the display URL is a factor. Before and after shots of the change are shown below, click to get a full image.

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Wheeeee. Google updates PR numbers in the toolbar every few months, and another update is happening. The numbers on the toolbar don’t represent anything that Google uses for rankings in its algorithm, except in an abstract way. The hip thing to do if you’re an SEOer is just to ignore it. I have the Google toolbar installed on my browser, and I still look at the numbers. Here’s what I use the numbers for:

1. Get a general idea if Google’s spider sees a page or counts it for anything. In particular, I look out for the grey bar.
2. Get a general idea of whether a page has links or whether a page is linked to from other pages that have links.
3. Show clients that, indeed, I have gotten their site some new links, pointing out an increase in toolbar PageRank.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) no longer has a $0.10 minimum bid according to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Minimum bids for keywords are based on quality and keyword value. Quality means they reward ads that get clicked on more relative to competitors with lower minimum bids. My experience with AdWords has been that this doesn’t matter a lick. Ads that get clicked on a lot are ranked higher and have low minimum bids but it doesn’t matter because you have advertisers lower than you for the keywords you’re bidding on. Then once you lower the bid to the minimum, the minimum starts going up again. This shouldn’t happen because the system is supposed to normalize for position, but from my experience, it does. I’m guessing Yahoo! will be the same.

The important factor is keyword value. AdWords made a lot of “long tail” terms more expensive by setting minimum bids higher – YSM might do the same. It might also affect some high traffic terms; the whole thing is sort of a mystery there. So for example, if I search “irs” on Yahoo!, I see more than 10 advertisers. On Google, I see one. This is probably because of minimum bids.

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