Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

A couple days ago Adobe and Yahoo announced that they are going to start serving up Yahoo ads in PDF docs. It's kind of an interesting development, because this not only expands the types of content that can be used by advertisers, it also gives publishers another way to monetize PDF ebooks and other useful content. There is already a lot of good, free pdf docs out there, but this will give people even more incentive to publish great content that can be monetized with ads rather than charging for the content.

Details about how PDF ads work



Here's a sample screenshot of what the ads look like

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that it's taken this long for them to figure out this revenue model. Everyone else has been doing this type of ads for a long time. The way it works is that the publisher of the PDF doc has to opt in to show ads on their doc and then they get a cut of the ppc fees. I assume Adobe's making a cut, too, and of course Yahoo gets their piece of the pie. The ads that are displayed are pulled from Yahoo's content ads, based on the content of the pdf.

If you want to sign up for the beta program and display ads in your pdfs, they're taking signups for the beta

If you want to advertise on other people's pdf docs, you can do so thorough a regular YSM account. Just make sure you're using "Content Match" and your ads should start showing up on relevant PDFs.

More on the news from Search Engine Land

Labels: yahoo

I feel like Google and Yahoo results are pretty comparable in terms of relevancy/quality--and have been for a few years now. Sometimes I get better results in Google, sometimes Yahoo. Well, according to the Compete blog Yahoo has a lot higher "search fulfillment" (meaning they find what they're looking for, or a least click through more on searches) than the other search engines. Too bad for Yahoo only 20% of the Internet population realize Yahoo's better.

Matt Cutts made the comment that more people use Google to find info that doesn't require a click through--and Google is better at providing info in a snippet so you don't have to click. Matt can't really argue with Compete's data, it's more like he's just caught up on the terminology. He's basically saying that just because people don't click through, doesn't mean they didn't "fulfill" their search query. Google doesn't need to defend itself on this issue--the fact is they have 70% of the market, so who cares if they get a slightly lower "fulfillment" ratio, or whatever you want to call it, they're still the king of search.

Labels: google, search engine stats, yahoo

I just read a very interesting report out of Penn State about an experiment they performed to see how a search engine brand influences the perception of relevance. They displayed the exact same set of search results for various keywords, but formatted with different search engine's logo/layout. Surprisingly, Yahoo came out with the best scores. I'm sure brand plays an important part in people's perception of search relevance, but I'm not sure I trust their results completely based on the sample size (32 people) and the methodology used. I hope this spawns some additional research into this concept of branding/search.

Labels: branding, search, yahoo

I remember the guys at Yahoo taking up their analytics solution several years ago, but until I read this article on NewsFactor, I'd kind of forgotten all about it. The article points out that Yahoo had acquired Keylime Software as part of its purchase of Overture. I had a Keylime sales rep give me a demo back in 2000 or 2001. It looked like a pretty cool system at the time. I haven't heard much talk about it, but this "new" analytics system is part of the new Panama search marketing system--but only available for advertisers spending at least $6K/year in YSM.

Labels: web analytics, yahoo

It's about time Yahoo joined the party and adopted a meta tag that allows site owners to tell Yahoo to use the HTML title instead of the Yahoo directory title. The search engines that use the ODP directory implemented a similar tag a while back. Yahoo has been promising a similar option for several months, so it's good to see it actually happen.

The code for the new tag is

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

or

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

Read about it on the Yahoo blog

Labels: directories, noydir, yahoo

I got an email this morning from YSM offering up some tips on how to get your site ranked well with their new ranking algorithm. If you understand what works in Google Adwords, you should now be able to apply those same principles in Yahoo. Here are 5 specific tips they offer:

• * Include keywords in your ad (use our Insert Keyword feature)
  
• * Choose keywords for each ad group carefully.
  
• * Use ad testing.
  
• * Use our Excluded Keyword feature to optimize your Advanced match type ads.
  
• * Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals.
  

So, there you have it.

Labels: ppc, tips, yahoo