One of the pioneers of pay per click marketing has completely given up! Yahoo Search Marketing, originally Overture, originally Goto, was the pioneer of the most popular advertising engine known today. One of the things I loved about YSM was that it held true to its roots. As other followers build their own PPC models, the norm was to follow what YSM/Overture had in their program. Then along comes Google and their AdWords version. Soon after came the big lawsuit claiming Google stole Overture’s patented technology. It was settled and then Yahoo bought Overture, but other than the big difference in traffic, YSM had so many better options than AdWords offered and personally I just thought AdWords would never live up to what YSM had.
Today I received the disheartening email from YSM about the upgrade of my account, the same one I created with Goto.com. Along with the notice, they had links to their help files and a tutorial that explained their new and “exciting” new system. It made me very unhappy to see they have completely given in and turned into a follower, rather than a leader in the PPC market. As an advertiser, you used to know exactly what it would take to outbid your competition. Now, they have adopted the same system AdWords has where it’s a complete guess on outbidding your competition. Along with the knowledge of top bids being taken away, they have changed their category folders to “campaigns” like AdWords. They have also changed the entire design and layout to mimic the way AdWords is laid out.
In summary, Yahoo has completely given up in their race to compete with Google. It’s a shame, but I guess they’re reaching for something to be as big as their leader.
3 comments ↓
Overture sucks for many years, it takes treble time to edit a listing then adwords. I seldom update it coz spend too much time just put a minimum let it go forever
Yahoo doesn’t have the right attitude. In fact, earlier this year the CEO of Yahoo straight up said that they “do not need to be the market leader” — “We just want to hold on to our market share” — that’s optimism.
Yahoo is a step behind google in every way related to PPC type ads. Their Yahoo Publisher system (Like google Adsense) is way behind the norm. We have been betatesting it, and after nearly 1 million page impressions, we can honestly say that their click-through rates are significantly lower than google’s. Google generally averages about 2.5% CTR, while yahoo is coming in at a paltry 0.7% over 6 months. Not to mention, they are 1 year behind on launching this to the general website public.
Google seems to be en route to destroy them.
The only edge Yahoo has at this point is in their social networking market segment. I am curious to see how Yahoo Answers works out in the next 1 - 2 years or so.
MegaD
ps — anyone know when we are going to get our account credits from that big class action lawsuit? I can’t wait! Free hits for 3 months! yee haw!
I have to clarify a couple of things that were mentioned. While Yahoo used to show you the top 5 bids and then a window with all the bids, it’s not that hard to find out what you need to pay in Google. Their estimate is just that, a rough estimate, and with a little trial and error you can figure out what it’s going to take to reach a certain position.
And if you get a copy of the downloadable program from Google, it eases a lot of the pain of creating and maintaining a lot of campaigns and AdGroups, because using it you can do things like copy all the ads from one adgroup and paste them into another. There are other things you can do to make many changes at once and then upload the mess to the account. The program also avoids some of the delays you get when working with the account on-line, and of course I’m sure it saves them quite a bit of bandwidth. I still have to work online when I need the keyword tool or current stats, but it’s much easier to work with now.
Yahoo sucks and (in my opinion) and always has. I think the main problem is with their partner network. I see the PNs as a problem with Google as well, but to a lesser degree. Look for someone to finally take the lead with flat-rate ads, something like what Adbrite is doing, but perhaps with a biding framework. The only way to kill the click fraud industry that I can see is with something like flat rate ads. As an AdSense publisher I know this may mean a drop in revenue, but it will also mean a more constant revenue level. Despite making a few bucks less I think it’s worth it.
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