Goodbye Yahoo! Hello Panama!
For a while now, I had been doing some affiliate marketing through Yahoo!, but was recently forced to suspend my campaigns there. Yahoo! has been an excellent source of traffic and conversions, but it’s clunky set up has proven costly. The good news is, most of these issues will be addressed in the much anticipated Panama Update.
Panama? Huh? That’s the name Yahoo! has given to the project of overhauling Overture to more closely resemble Google Adwords. With Google as the clear leader in the search marketing space, and Yahoo! losing market share every day, they have finally started to revamp their PPC offering. Among the additions are geo-targeting, campaign and ad group tiered structure and a more efficient editorial process. All this adds up to more organized, targeted campaigns that can be set up quickly.
It seems doubtful that Yahoo! will remove their $0.10 minimum bid, however they are going to be mimicking Google’s quality score method of ranking. Soon the days of the Overture straight auction model will be over. You won’t simply be able to bid to a position; but now you’ll have to have a combination of bid and click through rate to rank well. This may offset the cost of the $0.10 minimum by allowing higher rankings on other terms if you can really nail your ad copy. And to help you nail that copy, they are also introducing display URLs like Google. No more hideous affiliate links mucking up your pretty ads! We’ll have to wait and see if they limit the number of identical display URLs shown per search the way Google has.
So until Panama is in place, I am on hiatus from Yahoo! I’ve compensated by adding more products on Google, which is going quite well, but look forward to Yahoo!’s new offering to help raise volume. Many of us in the industry are very excited to see how well they can deliver on the hype, and even a slight improvement is going to mean money in everyone’s pockets.