Panama assesment

You may remember my earlier post about Yahoo's release of their new search marketing platform, Panama, well, it's been two weeks and it's time to assess if it has been beneficial to Yahoo and its advertisers.

According to a report issued on Monday by comScore Networks, click-through rates (CTR) for Yahoo search ads increased by 5 and 9 percent percent respectively during the first two weeks the company began delivering ads using the overly delayed Panama technology. More specifically, comScore says that CTR increased measurably in the weeks ending February 11 and February 18 versus the previous week, which ended on February 4. An increase in the CTR will result in more money for Yahoo. In addition to more money for Yahoo, the sponsored results are also more relevant to searchers, which will likely result in more searches done on Yahoo.

The entire objective behind the new technology was to close the gap between Google and everybody else in the search landscape. While two weeks is hardly enough time to claim any victories, the initial results are promising. However, the results may have been inflated because of gift hunters for Valentine's Day.

ComScore will be following the performance of the new ranking model and they will deliver analysis at the end of the first quarter.

Promoting my blog

In order to promote my blog, I posted on the BRT (first-year housing) blog that was created and maintained by the BRT RAs, about this blog and I added a link to the site. In addition, I on on Chelsea's blog about social networking because her post about Flock was relevant to my post about OurCity. I also e-mailed my blog to my boss at my summer internship at Modem Media who sent the link to the rest of the SEM staff.

Does anybody watch online video?

The answer is yes, and the percentage of people who watch online video is continually increasing, especially as more households are gaining broadband access. The graph below from emarketer and the U.S. Census Bureau shows the growing numbers and the correlation between broadband access and watching online video.

Well, who really cares if people are watching online video if you can't make money off it? Many companies have found ways to make a substantial amount of money through a sponsorship model.

Specifically, Revision 3, a company that produces online shows, has nearly perfected the model by delivering advertisers engaged audiences that are otherwise difficult to target. One of Revision 3's programs, Diggnation, which is "entertainment aimed directly at gadget-loving, commercial-skipping 18- to 34-year-old males who spend more time on the Web than in front of a TV" (CNN Money). Diggnation draws about 250,000 viewers a week and is among the most popular free video podcasts on Apple's iTunes service.

The picture below shows the two hosts of Diggnation, as well as the sponsorship model they use, which has been effective for Revision 3.


Since programming is very inexpensive to produce with a single camera, business can create shows that target niche audiences instead of the general public, which increase the value of the advertising.

With online video's ability to target such specific demographics, does it have the ability to oust TV programming? Not yet, but it can certainly supplement the expensive network advertising.

blinkx integrates video into websites

blinkx, which uses speech-to-text transcription to index online video content, now has available a new widget "blinkx it" that will allow a user to embed code to display video streams in a blog or website. This new widget allows users to add contextually relevant video to almost any page. Code and configurations are available for Blogger and Xanga, as well as instructions for how to add Blinkx it to most sites.

The widget retrieves results based on the text it scans on the web page. "blinkx it" even changes as the website is updated to deliver the most relevant results for the new page.

By embedding the “blinkx it” widget on a blog template “blinkx it” will automatically generate a list of related videos for every blog post. The widget works by reading the text of each individual post and finding videos that are about the same topic. I have imbedded it on my blog to give you an idea of how it works.

Right now this is just a feature for enhancing blogs and web sites with video content, but this has contexual video advertising written all over it.

Is there anything new in online shopping?

Online shopping has been a fixture on the internet and more and more people are doing their shopping online because it's usually just easier and sometimes cheaper. However, there haven't been too many changes in the sector.

NearbyNow is looking to change that.

NearbyNow is an online shopping search engine specifically made for local malls. It allows consumers to search various products and compare prices online, but buy the products in person. This is useful for products that consumers like to touch, feel, and experience, which applies to many higher priced items.



NearbyNow lets consumers search through the entire inventory of their local shopping malls. Now, shoppers at home can see what is new, and items that are on sale. They can search by category, but also search for things like coupons, or by stores.

NearbyNow is aiming to be within 30 miles of a NearbyNow-enabled shopping center by April 2007. Click here to take a look at the coverage map of NearbyNow.

NearbyNow provides participating shopping partners with advertising campaigns to promote the online product, as well as consumer purchasing patterns with metrics and behavioral data.

Here's a link to find out more about the type of information the site provides to customers, retailers, and advertisers.

We built OurCity

Something cool has just come out of India, a new local search product from Yahoo! It's called OurCity, and has some parallels with AskCity, but it is more comprehensive. OurCity is a city guide-like product that brings together a bunch of Yahoo! products like Del.icio.us, a social search engine, Upcoming, a social events calendar, and Flickr. It is also meant to compile geographically relevant news, blogs, and info from Wikipedia. Basically, it's all the the social media you can think of and a bag of chips.

Given its specific geographic relevance, it has the means to be an excellent addition to local advertising that is relevant to consumers.

The big question is are there going to be enough users for the product to actually work? A recent study by Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that 28 percent of Internet users have tagged or categorized content such as photos, or blog posts. It also found that "on a typical day online," 7 percent of internet users participate in the tagging of content. I guess that's a decent amount, but is it enough for me to spend money on it? I don't know yet, but Yahoo certainly believes that it is. If they are able to get enough users and modify their metrics, OurCity has the potential to change their revenues and possibly cause a shift in the share of the search market.
Don't be surprised when Google tries to come out with a product along these lines soon.

Wikimarketing

Let's just admit it, we've all come to know and love wikipedia (6th most visited collection of web properties in the world, according to comScore). Sure we know it's not 100% accurate, but that's not the point, the information is good enough and you know it's not something put out by some marketer. Marketers are now starting to use wikis as an extension of consumer generated content. "eBay has used wikis in its customer-support section, letting users collaboratively write answers to frequently asked questions. The NBA's Dallas Mavericks announced a plan to let fans wiki every game using the same software as Wikipedia. And T-Mobile launched a Sidekick wiki that has produced collaboratively written pieces including tips on how to pimp out the inside of the phone and a wish list of improvements the community would like to see. T-Mobile said the wiki is a forum where the Sidekick's biggest fans can tell others how to get more out of the product and relay information that isn't necessarily T-Mobile-related, such as how to create ringtones and find the best wallpaper. A T-Mobile spokesman said the company won't edit out negative feedback on the product, since that is valuable as well." (http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=114732) Wikis are a way for users to interact with the brand and make the product easier to use. They tend to be superior to message boards because boards can be very difficult to follow and you are less likely to have tangential posts on a wiki as oppossed to a message board. As long as marketers don't interfere with the wikis they should be well accepted by consumers an excellent source of brand interacation.

More keyword ideas for free?

In my last post I touched on some of the new additions that Yahoo! made to its search platform, but what I didn't mention was the very controversal removal of the Keyword tool, which helped advertisers come up with relevant keywords. The tool returned a list of similar keywords as well as a number of the approximate daily searches for the keyword. When advertisers saw this tool was removed, they were less than satisfied. Fortunately, KeywordDiscovery has developed a free search term suggestion tool.

The tool works in a similar manner as the former Yahoo! tool: you type in a keyword and similar keywords are returned. This tool returns the top 100 keywords from data compiled and collected from 180 search engines worldwide. Until this point, Yahoo! offered the only free keyword selection tool.

On the Webmaster World forums, YahooSarah said, "we do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year."

Panama released

Yahoo! has been scrutinized (and rightfully so) about their new search advertising platform that has been delayed and delayed, not to mention the difficulty in transitioning old keyword lists to the new platform. Well, today it's all a part of the past because they have officially released the new platform to all of their advertisers.

So what's the big deal? How does this affect the advertisers? How does it affect me as a searcher?

Yahoo! Search Marketing has been behind Google's AdWords as far as its usability, features, and profitablility. With the new platform, Yahoo! is adding in many features and tools that should bring its revenues closer to Google. One of the major additions to the platform is the implementation of Ad ranking. Ads will be placed higher based on a ranking system that factors in click-through-rate (CTR), relevance, and bid amount, instead of solely ranking the ads based on bid amounts. This will reward ads for being more relevant and it will provide searchers with ads that pertain to their query.
Another feature of the new platform is ad testing. This will allow advertisers to run different ad executions for the same keyword, and they will be able to see which ad has a higher CTR and Yahoo! will increase the frequency of the ad with the higher CTR. Therefore, the advertiser can see what copy appeals best to consumers, which will increase their ROI.
Yet another change in the system is the organization of the campaigns and keywords. Previously, keywords could only be organized as a campaign and there were no sub categories. Now, advertisers have the ability to create "Ad Groups" which gives advertisers the ability to create specialized keyword lists under their campaign. This makes tracking the success of certain ad groups easier, as well as making the system more user friendly because of its superior organization. The new organization method is nearly identical to Google's.
In addition to these features, Yahoo! has also added many more graphs, charts, and methods for measuring the success of ads, as well as assessing the ideal spending levels for campaigns.
Overall, the system is far superior to the previous platform, but Yahoo! still has a lot of ground to make up. For more information on Yahoo! Search Marketing, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

All Marketers are Liars

On February 22, 2006, Seth Godin travelled to the Google campus and gave a talk about his book "All Marketers Are Liars." The bottom line in his talk was that delivering content and products to consumers when and where they want it will result in increased sales.

I think Godin really captured everything that marketing and advertising should be: a medium for consumers to find relevant products and services at the optimal time for them. If marketers focus on targeting to specific consumers, then advertising wouldn't be considered as invasive and companies would get a higher return on their investment. Targeting specific consumers through behavior will only benefit everyone because the focus of various media would not be on selling ads, it would be on producing superior content, there would be more jobs for researchers and technology experts to determine the best way to target consumers, there would be higher profit margins for marketers, and media would be able to charge more for space because of the highly relevant consumers and an increase in the return on investment.

The predicament with this situation is actually being able to target consumers based on behavior and purchasing habits outside of the internet and direct mail because of the lack of personalization in mass media advertising. Also, certain ways to track behavior and past purchases would be considered an invasion of privacy by many people. However, it would ultimately result in the best situation for all parties.

Personally, I am all for personalization and targeting in advertising, as a consumer and a future advertiser, which is exactly what web advertising is able to deliver. On a regular basis there are new developments and I hope to be able to deliver the latest news to you, so you can improve your ROI and avoid some of those irrelevant and therefore, annoying ads.