E-Harbor Search Marketing Blog

A few months ago, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs released a keyword forecast tool which displays a search term’s impression count forecast and demographic predictions in any format (flash, picture, or text). The tool allows you to evaluate traffic for previous months as well as forecasting of impressions for future months.

It gives a very useful snapshot of detailed historical impression data, something that Yahoo! doesn’t offer and Google only offers visually with no numerical data. Here are a few screen shot examples of the search term impression data:

search term “real estate websites”

multiple search terms “real estate websites; realtor websites”

The side by side impression comparisons of search terms are very useful in identifying effective keywords. The demographic data is also very interesting, but I still question how reliable this data is. Overall, it’s an impressive tool, coming from adCenter, and hopefully they can continue to innovate and offer useful resources to online advertisers.

Yahoo! Search Marketing launches it’s update ad ranking system today. The new ranking model changes the way that advertisers ranking for various keywords and replaces the bid-to-position model. The new model is based on both bid and the quality index score - YSM’s measurement of CTR relative to other competing advertisers.

The new ranking model closely follows that of Google AdWords. YSM gives the following explanation for the change:

“When users engage with highly relevant ads, advertisers receive interested, valuable potential customers. This new ad ranking model should, in the long run, help bring up the value of our network for everyone: advertisers, partners, publishers and consumers alike.”

Overall, I think the change is a good one. It will essentially allow advertisers with the best ads win, which gives us an advantage over our less experienced competitors

Yahoo! Search Marketing has begun inviting advertisers, in the U.S., to upgrade it’s new Sponsored Search interface. The new interface changes resemble Google AdWords, with new organization of ad categories and ad listings. The YSM Upgrade Center includes checklists for preparation for upgrading, FAQs, and a request form for upgrading early.

Google AdWords has released a new tool for advertisers to enable them to easily test conversions on different landing pages and elements. The tool then shows advertisers the results, including graphs, allowing them to chose the best converting ad options for their campaigns. Advertisers interested in signing up for the beta can do that here: http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/.

Over at Search Engine Roundtable is a post regarding all of the problems that YSM is having with its account management interface. We’ve been experiencing the same problems and frustrations on our end since Monday (Oct. 9). As of this morning we’re finally able to login and manage our accounts with no problems.

It’s issues like this one that make us question who our primary ad portal should be moving forward. Yahoo! Search Marketing has always had the most problems between all the different ad portals we use for our clients. Hopefully, with the release of its new CPC model, YSM’s problems will become a thing of the past.