With the launch of Panama early this year, there has been a lot of industry buzz around Panama improving Yahoo’s advertising fortunes. Early reviews have been positive. Because people ask us a lot how Panama is working for our customers, I thought it would make a good post.

In 2006, our clients’ Yahoo spend as a percentage of Google spend steadily decreased. The decrease was due to a number of factors including lower search volume, lower clickthrough rates (CTR), and most importantly for our clients, lower return on investment (ROI) on Yahoo relative to Google.

However, in the first two months of 2007, spend on Yahoo as a percentage of spend on Google began to increase. During this time, most of our clients were migrating to the new Panama platform (because our client base is primarily retail, many had declined to do so during Q4). With the official launch of Panama in February, our clients saw this as an opportunity to re-launch campaigns and, given the promise of Panama, retry a more robust keyword set (keywords that have been deleted or taken off-line over time due to poor performance on Yahoo).

In March 2007, though, spend on Yahoo as a percentage of spend on Google decreased substantially. Why did this happen? In February, the increase in Yahoo spend did not result in the corresponding increase in sales required to hit our clients’ ROI goals. Because the conversion percentage and ROI declined on Yahoo in February, our clients’ spend on Yahoo necessarily decreased in March to ensure that they were hitting their ROI goals. Based on aggregate ROI on Yahoo relative to Google in March, I don’t anticipate a further decrease in this ratio and I suspect that Yahoo spend as a percentage of Google spend will level off or slightly increase moving forward in 2007.

From Yahoo’s perspective, Panama seems to be having some benefits. In 2007 to date, we have seen Yahoo’s CTR increase (even as keyword volume has increased), suggesting that Panama may be having a positive impact on CTR. But, if ROI is not sufficient for our clients on Yahoo, our clients (working in collaboration with our full-service paid search team or using our self-service tool) will cut spend on the lower ROI keywords and exercise a bit more caution experimenting with new keywords. This is one reason, but certainly not the only one (search volume!) that spend on Yahoo trails spend on Google.

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We’re excited to greet our Friday blog readers with some very exciting news!

In the last few hours, Google has rolled out its popular payment method, Google Checkout in the UK.

And of course, ChannelAdvisor has been working closely with Google UK for several months to ensure we were able to support this new payment option from day one. Which is great news for our UK clients who will be among the first retailers in the UK to be able to take advantage of all its benefits. Check out our official press release.

If you want to learn more now, read on….

What is Google Checkout?
Google Checkout is an alternative checkout flow that is designed to be fast, easy and secure. Industry data shows that a whopping 63% of checkouts are abandoned by shoppers AFTER they start to checkout. That’s a lot of lost sales. So, Google set out to come up with a cleaner, easier checkout process that would ensure more of these shoppers turn into buyers. Enter Google Checkout.

Google Checkout launched in the US in June 2006 and ChannelAdvisor offered immediate support then as well. Over the past 9 months our US clients have given us really positive feedback about the impact on their conversions, as well as their improved click-through rates on their Adwords listings.

So, let’s take a look at exactly what Google has announced so far:

For merchants:

• FREE payment processing for merchants for the rest of 2007 !
• After the free payment processing expires (i.e. Jan 1st 2008) get £10 free payment processing for every £1 spent on Google Adwords
• A very competitive 1.5% + 15p charged on all transactions that fall outside the above two conditions
• Free fraud protection technology

For buyers:

• A crazy £10 off any order over £30 if paid for using Google Checkout!

This is incredible news for both merchants and buyers. If you’re a merchant selling online then we recommend you take a look at how Google Checkout can help you to save a ton of money on processing fees.

And don’t forget that it should also improve the ROI of your paid search campaigns.

How? Simple. If you are a Google Adwords advertiser and you accept Google Checkout on your website, a snazzy Google Checkout badge will appear on your Adwords listings. We’ve seen this positively impact buyer click-through rates (CTR) when compared to listings without the badge - which means, assuming an identical bid amount, your ads will appear higher than competitor’s that aren’t accepting Google Checkout.

Want to learn more?
Here are some great Google resources to find out more:

Google Checkout official website - http://www.google.co.uk/checkout

Google Checkout blog - http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/

Meet the Google Team!
And if you want to hear from Google in the flesh, then be sure to make it along to our Catalyst conference next Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th to meet the team from Google UK and hear a presentation from Robert Swerling, Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google. We have a few seats left so please register and join us if you can!

Sign up for our webinar
If you’re not able to make it along to Catalyst, then be sure to register for our upcoming webinar, “Google Checkout UK Explained” which takes place at 2pm GMT on Monday 23rd April. Google will be co-presenting this webinar with ChannelAdvisor so expect lots of great content and a sizable Q&A section! Details on how to register for this webinar will be posted to the blog very soon.

Watch this space for lots more info!

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From time to time, I’ll post little site tidbits here that I don’t see mentioned anywhere else. Here’s one I found out the other day.

We were working with a customer who was rejected from MSN Shopping submission because of site requirements, in particular, to be on MSN Shopping you must:

• spend at least $5,000/month.
• have at least 2000 products in their catalog

If anyone can find these publicly mentioned on MSN’s site, feel free to post the link; I had not seen this mentioned anywhere.

Have a great Easter weekend.

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Get ready for a bumper few days of online sales! The British Retail Consortium (BRC) forecasts that consumers will spend an estimated £4.3 billion in the week running up to Easter, with a further £3.5 billion spent over the Easter weekend.

This equates to £832 million (20%) more than in an average week in April which means the average UK household will spend £350 over the next four days!

“Easter generally marks the end of the toughest quarter in the retail calendar. After using the first few months in the New Year to service post-Christmas debt and consolidate savings, consumers tend to feel a bit more relaxed about splashing out over Easter,”

Here are some of the categories that will be particularly hot this weekend:

• Clothing and footwear retailers will take £670 million over the holiday weekend.

• DIY and gardening will benefit from the four-day weekend, especially if the weather is fine. 6 million consumers are expected to spend £2.9 billion undertaking jobs left over the winter.

So, if you sell products that fall into one of these categories it might be worth promoting them on the homepage of your website to ensure maximum exposure to shoppers. And be sure to make sure your feeds to the shopping comparison sites are up-to-date and accurate so that consumers can find your products wherever they chose to shop online.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, approximately 8 million Easter cards will be sent - with a value of £22 million.

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An eBay seller received an invitation a few days ago to participate in Google Audio Ads:

We’d like to invite you to try a new extension of AdWords — Google Audio Ads, which makes radio advertising easier by providing an online interface for creating and launching radio advertising campaigns. Google Audio Ads allows you to select from hundreds of U.S. radio stations on which you can run ads — you can even target customers by station type, demographics, and time of day. To learn more, watch a multimedia overview of Audio Ads: https://trainingcenter.google.com/audioadsdemo/

To make it easier to get started with Google Audio Ads, we are offering $400* toward your first radio ad campaign. If you’d like to take advantage of this promotion, you must create your radio ad using the Google Ad Creation Marketplace, a searchable directory of professional ad creation specialists. Note: the specialist who creates your ad will charge you separately from the advertising costs you’ll accrue once your campaign starts running.

Slick training presentation using Macromedia Breeze.

So should you as an eBay seller jump on this? If you’re already using AdWords and you feel you have this under control (hopefully using our SearchAdvisor product) then this may be the next channel for your marketing. May be worth, depending on your budget, to try a few key markets and see what traffic it drives to your eCommerce site. After all, we at ChannelAdvisor have also just recently begun using radio ads to attract high-quality employees for our Seattle and Morrisville offices.

If you’re looking to upgrade your job, check out our openings. Preference is given to fans of Star Wars, eBay, Lego’s and foosball (all four is a “shoo in”).

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