Great news! Yahoo has just confirmed they plan to speak at our ChannelAdvisor Catalyst conference in London on April 18th/19th.

Richard Firminger, Regional Sales Director Europe for Yahoo Search Marketing will introduce Yahoo’s new Panama search marketing platform, due for launch in the UK sometime in Q2. This should be a very interesting and informative presentation with lots of time for questions. Yahoo has invested a lot in this new search marketing platform and from the previews we’ve seen, it looks very impressive. Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity to hear first hand how Yahoo! plans to use Panama to shake up the UK paid search landscape. Can they take some of Google’s massive 75% market share??

If you haven’t already booked your place at the event, be sure to do so in the next couple of weeks before prices go up. We’re already half full and have about two months still to go. If you are serious about succeeding online in 2007 and beyond, you need to be there!

Share This

Big news from ChannelAdvisor today for eTailers that want to cost-effectively manage and scale their paid search campaigns without adding costly resources or sacrificing ROI targets. Today we are launching our new SearchAdvisor product after a lot of kick-*** work from our engineers over the last few weeks.

They have essentially taken our cool in-house search platform, sprinkled some pixie dust on it and turned it into the single solution to manage keywords on a product or sales margin basis for Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com (yes, all of them), allowing you to know which keywords drive the most profit…and which keywords fail to drive a profit.

What does SearchAdvisor do for online retailers? Lots of great things:

• Integrated Campaign Management
  Use a single interface to create, manage and analyze paid search campaigns.
• Search Marketing Analytics
  Robust reporting that allows you to optimize campaigns based on the profitability of individual keywords enabling you to view campaign performance by order, products sold or revenue generated.
• Bulk Campaign Upload
  Define your search marketing campaigns and keywords, then launch your paid search marketing efforts to all supported engines with a single click.
• Automated Bid Management
  Create and manage bidding rules that automatically adjust your bid strategies based on performance, eliminating the daily workload which allows you to focus on your overall success.
• Multi-Channel Reporting
  Integrate and track all of your multi-channel performance including paid search, natural search and comparison shopping engines from a single application allowing you to maximize your time and profitability.
• Landing Page Optimization
  View the performance and compare landing pages based on combined revenue, expense, conversion rates and profitability across all channels.

If creating, analyzing and optimizing multiple campaigns on multiple search engines or evaluating and acting on per-term profitability is giving you headaches, SearchAdvisor may just be that silver bullet you’re looking for.

Share This

Except when it comes to PPC ad-ranking. Yahoo recently announced that it will move away from the transparent model Overture originally pioneered where ad position was based solely on bid, and moving more to a Google-like model where things like ad quality are taken into account.

Here’s what Yahoo! defines as ad quality, as messaged from their e-mail to advertisers (source: Threadwatch):

What is “Ad Quality”?
Ad quality is determined by:
The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.

The ad’s expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

No mention of landing page quality, which Google also incorporates.

Share This

The Wall Street Journal maintains a great blog on holiday sales news that especially during this merry time is an excellent resource for tracking how online retailers are faring. Yesterday it reported on an interesting ForeSee Research study.

Netflix, Amazon.com, LL Bean, and QVC.com ranked best in customer satisfaction during the holiday season, according to ForeSee Results’ Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index. Ranking at the bottom of the index: CompUSA, Costco, and CDW.com. The study found that department stores — including the sites for J.C. Penney, Sears and Target — scored huge improvements, and that in general, most retailers scored higher than last year. Overall, customers were more satisfied with apparel Web sites than with mass merchants or electronics retailers.

Amazon continues to lead the pack of online retailers in customer satisfaction (disregarding Netflix for a moment as more of a service provider then traditional merchant). There is no consolidated list of marketplaces available (eBay is tracked as an internet auction provider) but that is pretty easy to create using published American Customer Satisfaction Index data and the WSJ post:

Marketplaces Customer Satisfaction Ranking (2006 data unless otherwise indicated)

1. Amazon (87 — 2005 score)
2. eBay (81 — 2005 score)
3. Yahoo! (76)
4. uBid (73 — 2005 score)
5. Overstock.com (71)

For good measure I am also including below satisfaction scores for the leading search engines although scores for Microsoft and Yahoo! should be taken with a grain of salt because of their big product portfolio.

1. Google (81)
2. Yahoo! (76)
3. Microsoft (73)
4. Ask.com (71)

The simplified implication for online merchants is of course to take a good look at the top-rated channels as that is where the buyers are flocking.

Share This

Data from the latest Hitwise UK Search Update reveal that Google and Yahoo!’s share of the search market is growing and driving up the share of referrals from search engines to retail websites.

Google powered a massive 78% of UK internet searches in the four weeks to 21st October 2006, up 9% year-on-year. Yahoo! took the No.2 spot based on share of executed UK searches with 7.7% of the search market. Together Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com powered 96.6% of all UK internet searches, up 2% year-on-year.

It is a well-known fact that consumers are increasingly using search engines to navigate the web, with the importance of search engines growing as a source of referrals for retailers. Google and Yahoo! Search in particular are seeing strong growth in their share of the UK search market and their share of referrals to online retailers.

Interestingly, Hitwise reveals that,

“Whilst there appears to be no indication that paid search is a defining factor for top ranking based on share of internet visits, leading retailers tend to engage in at least some paid search activity.”

In this respect it is clear that the UK paid search market is much less mature than the US, although all the signs are that it is catching up at a cracking pace. If you are a UK retailer looking to compete in 2007, paid search needs to be at the top of your New Year’s Resolution list.

Share This