Dangerous Thinking

Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo Tops Google in Customer Satisfaction Ranking. The data comes from ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index), whose Q2 2007 ACSI Scores show Yahoo up 3.9% to 79% satisfaction and Google down 3.7% to 78% satisfaction.

SEJ suggests the following as drivers for the results:

What could have influenced the rise in customer satisfaction with Yahoo (opinion)?

* Implementation of targeted Yahoo Shortcuts
* Serving Yahoo Answers in Selected Results
* Consolidation of various services into one package (Yahoo Photos/Flickr)
* Cutting back on fluffy Weather or News shortcuts where they are not needed
* Better ad targeting via Yahoo Search Marketing Panama
* Better Image Search with live Flickr photos

Why may have customer satisfaction at Google fallen (opinion)?

* Confusing Google Universal Results inserting video & news into content
* Changing of AdWords Background Colors
* Outdated homepage
* Personalized search results
* Dropping of Froogle

I wonder if we’re seeing some simple anti-Google backlash, too, as it dominates the Web.

It’ll be interesting to see if the commonly-perceived failing Yahoo maintains its challenge to Google in other surveys in the coming months.

We’ve all been looking at the effects of the algorithm tweaks going on at Google. Then, earlier this week, we noticed some strange stuff happening with Yahoo results. Here’s why (from the Yahoo Search Blog):

We rolled out some changes to our index and ranking algorithm last night. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages included in the index. This update should be complete very soon.

Yep, I got snagged by this post on Yahoo’s blog.

What are the common words that vex our searchers? We applied our best spell checking skills to the data and came up with this list of the top 20 misspelled words in Search…

1. Wallmart (Wal-Mart)
2. Rachel Ray (Rachael Ray)
3. Amtrack (Amtrak)
4. Hillary Duff (Hilary Duff)
5. Katherine McPhee (Katharine McPhee)
6. Britany Spears (Britney Spears)
7. Geneology (Genealogy)
8. Jaime Pressley (Jaime Pressly)
9. Volkswagon (Volkswagen)
10. Wikepedia (Wikipedia)
11. William Sonoma (Williams-Sonoma)
12. Tatoo (Tattoo)
13. Travelosity (Travelocity)
14. Elliot Yamin (Elliott Yamin)
15. Kiera Knightley (Keira Knightley)
16. Kelly Pickler (Kellie Pickler)
17. Brittney Spears (Britney Spears)
18. Avril Lavinge (Avril Lavigne)
19. Rianna (Rihanna)
20. Jordan Sparks (Jordin Sparks)

I have to say all it proves is teens can’t spell selebrety names.

OK, I know it’s a bit of fun, but I’d love to see the Top 100 misspelled non-celebrity words worldwide and in the UK, and the Top 100 misspelled brands. That may just be interesting.

The role of landing pages continues to be a bit of a mystery to many people who run PPC campaigns.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised quite how much of a gotcha they can become for some people. You see, as someone trained as a direct marketing copywriter, I naturally think in terms of how a person will make their way from initial contact through to sale.

When you use PPC, the route looks something like this:

SEARCH ON KEY PHRASE -> CLICK ON PPC AD -> LANDING PAGE -> BASKET/ORDERING SCREENS -> CHECKOUT

The landing page can be the home page, but it’s just as likely not to be. If you’ve developed enough content to properly match up with the interests of your visitors – sell to your prospects – you should have some copy that matches with the key phrases you’re buying traffic on. If you find yourself directing traffic from all your ads to the home page (or any other catch-all page), you should be asking yourself why there isn’t any copy to satisfy those specific interests.

Without that fit between search and landing page, you’ll be causing yourself two problems. Firstly you’ll be failing to manage your visitors’ expectations effectively, and they’ll be very likely to just go back to the search page because they cannot see what they’re looking for. You’ll have paid for a click and not done anything profitable with it, so pushing up your cost per conversion and having a disastrous impact on your ROI.

Secondly, you’ll be running the risk of attracting the wrath of the Google Adwords system (and if my reading of Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest rules is correct, most of these points also apply to advertising on YSM). If Adwords believes the landing page is not relevant to the key phrase traffic being bought, it will just refuse to run your ad; if it believes the landing page content is marginally relevant, then you’ll end up paying more for your clicks. So you may be blocked from buying the traffic you need, or your ROI may end up being affected through paying more for clicks – even if you do manage to move the visitor on from a less-than-relevant landing page through to purchase.

Another implication is that PPC has become less of a standalone add-on, something you can just fire up and point at your home page. Many of the marketplaces I look at are getting more and more difficult to make good margins in because costs per click (CPCs) are regularly hitting £1 plus. So that means you have to do everything you possibly can to buy traffic at as low a CPC as you can, and then engage with your visitors as effectively as you can.

Proper landing pages can help with both these issues.

YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) is junking the long descriptions in its ads. No longer do we have 190 characters to get over our message, but we have just 70, instead – the current short description.

I’ll leave it to YSM to explain why:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

I wonder if this is really true. Longer rubbish copy doesn’t get you anywhere, but longer good-quality copy normally out-performs shorter copy on line as it does off line. I think, instead, Yahoo! is just continuing to make YSM more and more like Google Adwords.

What happened to the idea of brand differentiation? Why should I ever buy a pale imitation of the original or the market leader, unless it’s significantly cheaper.

I do hope that YSM will tell me a compelling reason for recommending YSM to my clients – for Yahoo’s sake, as well as mine.

As regular readers of this blog may have realised, I’m not a great fan of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). However, on the face of it, they seem to be gradually getting their act together by launching their Panama update.

Luckily, we set up a US YSM account for one of our clients last year, so we have been able to look at what’s happening – you did realise that for every country you want to run YSM ads in, you need to set up a separate account, and run them individually? Because YSM doesn’t cover anything like every major country in the world – whatever happened to that India account I enquired about in September, or thereabouts, last year? – you can’t even make a decent fist of a worldwide campaign.

I’ve tried running a YSM campaign in five countries. It was bloody, involving loads of duplicated effort and mind-numbing inconsistencies in advertisement approval rules between Yahoo! territories. It’s an experience I don’t want to repeat again too soon.

Google Adwords is so much easier and more cost-effective in terms of management time for our clients than YSM. Google lets me target a large list of countries, or a localized campaign right down to a circle around a particular Postcode (even more flexibility in some countries) all from one Campaign definition.

If I seem to be making a general critique of YSM rather than the Panama update, it’s because it seems to be just window-dressing, failing to tackle the real structural problems Yahoo! has with its Pay Per Click offering. Sure, introducing Ad Groups will make day-to-day management easier if you’re running a campaign in the US – we’re still waiting for Panama in the rest of the world.

But it still doesn’t look as if Yahoo! is going to integrate its YSM territories anywhere soon. That would be a real win for advertisers and agencies. And for Yahoo!

OK. Back to Panama. The new screens look better considered than the old horrors. But I also wonder of they’ve made a howling mistake in following the Google Adwords model so slavishly and jettisoning YSM’s real USP, its transparency of bidding. It’s what many professionals like. And it’s no longer there. YSM has come over all mysterious like Adwords when it comes to what we actually pay for a click.

So permit me a not-so-polite yawn and allow me to go back to recommending and using Google Adwords for most client campaigns.

I don’t usually use this blog for letting off steam or having a good rant, but I’m going to make an exception in the case of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM).

Yesterday, after a weekend away and in a really good frame of mind, I logged into YSM, ready to set up a campaign for a client in plenty of time for the start next week (even with YSM’s mad window of up to 10 days (I kid you not!) for ad approval) – and found a message saying:

SEARCH LISTINGS MANAGEMENT ISSUES:
We are aware of current difficulties in adding, modifying or deleting listings and are working to correct the problem. Please check back for updates.

OK. I’ll check back tomorrow, I thought, in my post-Parisian glow.

The same message is there today – with no ETA for a fix, you’ll notice. It may have been there since last Friday, for all I know. The pages within have error messages where the data should be. The service is currently as useful as the proverbial chocolate fireguard.

I e-mailed support and was told they might just get back to me if they felt like it within 24-48 hours.

What is it that Yahoo! uses for communication? A retired gent as a runner, shouldering a leather satchel? Clapped out carrier pigeons? Second class mail?

Yahoo certainly gives clients and SEM professionals like me a second class service. I’m reminded why I almost always point my clients towards Google Adwords, unless they have a large enough budget to warrant our fees for having to deal with the positively Victorian-feeling Yahoo edifice.

This kind of thing is another reminder why Yahoo is scratching around way behind in Google’s slipstream generally.

Update (12 October): YSM’s errors have disappeared, and so I can get on with setting up the campaign, two days late. I’m still waiting for an answer to one of my questions from YSM support.

It’s nearly a couple of weeks since Yahoo! launched its tasty new Slurp, its Web crawler. I’ll leave it to you to read the claimed benefits from the Search Engine’s mouth, so to speak.

All this certainly explains some of the bizarre results we’ve been seeing from Yahoo! for some of the sites we track in what we now know was the run up to the official release. And the variations aren’t over yet, by the look of it – and why should they be? Unfortunately, any significant changes implemented by the search engines always leave a little mess in their wakes. Unfortunately, we all have to live with it.

But, the good thing is that we’re seeing client Web sites popping up more strongly now on Yahoo! than they have been in the recent past. We’ll be watching to see if they settle down as they should do.