And that was search marketing in 2008….

Ξ December 24th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Search Engines, News, SEO, SEMPO, Yahoo, Industry, Google, Microsoft, Paid Search |

It’s a bit like dog years. Every year in search marketing feels like 7 because so much changes so quickly, and 2008 has been no exception. I wanted to close off 2008 by running through some of the key UK search news of 2008.

Trademark wars

In May, Google updated its UK trademark policy to put it closer in line with the US market, effectively allowing advertisers to bid on any term (even “Google”) but still restricting the use of trademarked terms in ad creative. While the initial change brought much uproar,  the subsequent impact on CPCs was limited thanks to the Quality Score rendering a lot of search ads irrelevant.

Left standing at the altar

After many “Will they? Won’t they?” moments Microsoft finally walked away  from an acquisition of Yahoo in May of this year. There are still rumours of further partnership opportunities between the two companies but Steve Ballmer has been very clear that an acquisition is now firmly “off the table”.

Any bets? 

Hot on the heels of a disappointing Q3 earnings call, Google relaxed its UK restrictions on gambling ads with such short notice that many gambling companies were forced to simply re-allocate budgets from Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter in the short-term. In 2009 it’s been predicted that this could grow to be one of the largest categories for search advertising.

More support for SEOers

This year, both Google and Microsoft increased their support for the SEO community with improvements to webmaster central and an abundance of best practice guides and tips. One of the most topical at the time was Google’s commentary on dynamic vs. static URLs.

Quality, Quality, Quality

2008 saw a myriad of changes to Google’s quality score, including:

·         Factors influencing the quality score were increased to include the load time of landing pages.

·         The calculation of quality score became real-time and more transparency was provided on a scale of 1 to 10 and an indication of the cost of a “First Page Bid”.

·         CTR was “normalized” to reflect an ads position on the page and higher relevance made a top sponsored listing more achievable -

 Ring my bell

The 1^st December was a momentous day for SEMPO when a delegation of members rang the bell at NASDAQ and launched this 5th annual “State of the Market” survey for search marketing.  To complete the survey head over to  the SEMPO website.

Will 2009 see as much change as this year? Paul Doleman will be posting his thoughts on that in the near year so be sure to look back after your Christmas break.

 

Merry Xmas from SEMPO UK

 

 

 

Yahoo Panama

Ξ July 18th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Search Engines, Yahoo |

As I’m sure many of you are aware Yahoo! has completed the migration of UK advertising accounts onto Panama.

Panama - what’s that? In simple terms it is Yahoo!’s new system for managing and serving Pay-Per-Click adverts.

So does it live up to the hype? Errrm, well it does have a number of new features:

• account structures similar to Google,

• the ability to split budgets within one account,

• campaign start and end date setting,

• daily spend limits,

• the ability to run 20 different types of copy and optimise by click through rate,

• new reporting tools,

• geo-targeting,

• and the ability to upload copy directly via the interface.

So what’s the verdict? Well all these features improve matters, expecially the interface upload - which is making a big impact on the FMCG market, but the biggest impact by far is the change to the bid landscape caused by the quality score introduction.

This brings Yahoo! in-line with Google and MSN and from the outside looks like it is going to be a big success, but there is one problem. When the system launched some accounts were given an unfair advantage as not everyone was migrated onto the new system before the new ranking was activated.

Why is that a problem? It’s simple really - it realtes to the way the new algorithm works - using relevancy and bid price to determine your rank. Those accounts that were live on Panama when the new ranking was activated have had the opportunity to build clicks and history, whilst those left behind have not.

Bluntly, if you were one of the last accounts to be migrated, you may have to pay more.

Is there a fix? The simplest way is to create a level playing field by Yah00! pressing the reset button and clear all account history, resetting the ranking for everyone - but will they do this?