According to MediaPost.com, Yahoo has plans to issue a “variety of tools for advertisers aimed at lowering costs for paid search campaigns”
On Friday Yahoo is going to announce it will allow advertisers to participate in its BOSS (Build your Own Search Engine) search program through a deal with Domain Development Corp.,(an Advertiser on This Blog).
“””Advertisers will bid within the same search marketplace, Panama, but the ads will appear on third-party Web sites participating in BOSS. Domain Development Corp. will work with the advertisers to serve up the ads on the sites and earn a share of the revenue from it.”””
In support of the new program, , Yahoo will allow advertisers to learn how ads perform across the network.
Based on the delivery report, advertisers will be allowed to block specific ads from appearing on certain sites.
Advertisers will gain a feature called Network Distribution that allows them to create an individual campaign with a separate bid for different sources of traffic across the Yahoo network.
Advertisers will also have an option to create a campaign that only runs on the Yahoo network, the Partner network, or both. This will also allow advertisers to adjust bids and customize campaigns
“We looked across our network of traffic to get to the proper cost-per-acquisition equivalents for all sources of traffic across all advertisers,” Pann says. “For certain sources of traffic that might be valuable, but not priced correctly, we made changes to our marketplace so we now price them accordingly with the value they deliver to advertisers.”
It turns out the team could look at conversion data for all advertising classes, pair them up with traffic sources, and using algorithms, adjust the prices automatically.”
During the last six months, Yahoo has seen the cost per acquisitions (CPA) in aggregate decline between 20% and 22%, he says. PPC clicks have been discounted between 10% and 15%, depending on the category””
“David Pann, Yahoo vice president and general manager of search marketing, believes the innovation begins with shaking up its pricing structure to lower costs for clicks. Advertisers don’t want to pay the same price today for search campaigns that they did last year””
The Network Distribution program will not roll out in the U.S. until the first quarter of 2010.
Yet the direction of Yahoo seems clear.
Already admitting that they have forced PPC’s rates to decline 10%-15%, Yahoo wants to further lower the rates for PPC ads for its advertisers which can’t be good for domainers.
We will try to reach DDC today for comment and further explanation of the program and how they see it affecting returns to domainers.
seems like it will be too complicated for many to take the time to learn to use…we’ll see
It will be too complicated and they will just nix anything that is not Yahoo search.
Time to move away from domain parking 100%. Yahoo is not our friend anymore.
Thanks a lot Yahoo!
Cindy, I felt that way for 18 months. And, G. has never been my buddy.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if banner farms with a little bid of content start all over again?
(Even less than mini-sites.)
Actually this is incorrect. If there are different price auctions and conversion is higher on domain parked traffic the CPC auctions will be more competitive on the third party syndicated traffic and therefore make for higher bids. The only sufferers will be those domains with low-converting traffic or in low-converting verticals, in which case it would make more sense to use the general Yahoo feed in this instance.
In this case you can have two faces and tell advertisers traffic will be cheaper, because it will. Placement traffic will attract higher bids if these placements (parked domains) increase conversion.
Roy
I have yet to see a rollout of any “improvement” to any search platform that has not decreased the payout we receive from parking providers and we have a TQ score of 10 at Yahoo (of course Google does not disclose).
If Yahoo reduces the price for advertisers we will get less.
Again
I understand payouts have been decreasing and it’s putting the pinch on everyone. I, for one, don’t want to stick up for the search engines because of their track record. As an advertiser, which my role consists a lot more of these days, I do understand backend metrics and what I’m willing to pay more for. I really do think that they will find some way to lower TAC costs so they just make more margin and it’s not passed along. If you look at Google’s model you can do site placements and those things cost quite a premium. It’s a step in the right direction for Yahoo and I think if anything it will save Yahoo, but they do need to reward the publisher (domainer in this instance) because that’s the only way they’re going to keep having search inventory to sell to these advertisers. Another thing Yahoo needs to do is to stop disclosing TQ’s because it’s just a vehicle to circumvent. Because G doesn’t disclose SP scoring is one reason they can quietly discount low-quality traffic. I know it’s counter-intuitive to transparency but you can’t be transparent with the good guys and expect the bad guys to not exploit it.
Roy
I have no problem with the search engines discounting crap traffic.
The search engines created this problem by paying for crap traffic years ago, which only caused more crap traffic to come on board over the years.
Had they blocked the crap traffic from the get go, then there would have been no incentive to generate crap traffic because there would have been no one to sell it to.
Having said that, the argument that crap traffic should get paid less and less is fine but that would mean good or great traffic should increase in value and payouts.
The problem is Google and Yahoo whether they disclose or don’t disclose quality scores, have been paying less for the good and great traffic and much less for the crap traffic.
So there are no winners only losers.
If payments for crap traffic goes down to zero, then quality traffic should have increased in value.
Bottom line is that the search engines are just using the “quality issue” to reduce payments they make for traffic and really who can blame them.
Since domainers are selling the same traffic they sold to Google last year for $1, which they sold to Google in January for $. 70 and are still willing to sell to Google now in October for $.40, Google will simply continue to squeeze channel and reduce the payments for the traffic until and unless they get to the point where they see a major loss in traffic.
Same for Yahoo.
Except once Yahoo search market share gets squeezed further (now at 10% down from 20%) it will become irrelevant and we will be in a monopolistic situation with only one upstream provider and guess what we will get paid then.