I received an email from Yahoo yesterday, like I’m sure many other marketers did, telling me that several interesting pieces of data were going to go the way of the dinosaur. Basically, as Yahoo moves to a more Google like model, they are obscuring pricing and rank information. Here’s what’s going away (Position, Your Cost, and Top 5 Bids):

And here’s what it’s being replaced with:
Estimated Average Position
This displays an estimate of the average position your listing may achieve, based on your bid and the current bids of other advertisers.

Bid Range for Top Positions
This displays the current range of bids other advertisers are willing to pay for the positions at the top of the search results page.

Share This

Looks like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (GYM) are combining forces on the Sitemaps standard. They’ve created a website sitemaps.org.

Here are links to Yahoo! and Google announcing the change. It looks like when one engine, or maybe Google mostly, hits on a good idea, other engines aren’t shy to pick up on it. The same thing happened with the NOFOLLOW attribute on links.

Sitemaps allows you to describe your site better to search engines, as well as gives you some insight into the crawling performance of your website.

Some things I wonder about with this announcement:

• With RE: Yahoo’s paid inclusion strategy: I suppose Paid Inclusion will have preference over Sitemaps submitted data?
• When will Ask.com follow?

Share This

Stating the obvious, Google is constantly innovating with new and existing products and purchasing complementing products (Google acquires Jotspot, an enterprise wiki company) stomping its competitors left and right (I particularly like the recent comment by an analyst that Yahoo! should consider letting Google sell their ads, ditching its new search platform Panama as sunk cost).

Many of our customers here at ChannelAdvisor are very interested in what our friends on the Google Checkout team are working on and last week got some good news. Google Checkout now allows merchants to define coupons within their seller interface to deduct at checkout time either a fixed amount or a percentage of the purchase price and restrict remittance by cart size, frequency and new-buyers-only. For all of you that hate when someone reads of slides, here’s a screenshot:

Merchants can set up and market coupon codes in e-mail, on their site, invoices and catalogs and allow buyers to remit these during their checkout at Google, although I am not sure if and how they stack. Great timing for the upcoming holiday season.

Granted eBay’s shining star PayPal has had coupon functionality for quite some time and their redesigned Express Checkout looks better than ever (hmm, that button design though looks very familiar). But unless PayPal works on their economics (Yahoo! search incentives?) Google Checkout is going to continue to slowly but surely grab market share. Fortunately PayPal is not sleeping, making a splash last week with HP’s announcement that their Home and Home Office Store now accepts PayPal. Long live competition.

Share This