Dec
13
2011
The clock is ticking… and soon the final curtain will come down on what was the founding father of PPC – Yahoo! Search Marketing (nee Overture).
All we can say is: the end can’t come soon enough. The clunky interface was delivered late and was dated even before it was birthed. Little was done to improve it, and as Google evolved and Microsoft entered the market, there it stood, stuck in time.
However, that was just about bearable as long as the performance worked. But, as the months went by the slide continued… 20%, 15%, 10% … now about 5% of Google’s reach.
Yet, this article is not about that… What has become increasingly unbearable is the active encouragement of click misbehaviour on Yahoo’s part. We won’t use the word ‘fraud’ for fear of litigation – but let’s call it click ‘flawed’.
We give you a tale of increasing desperation which has led to the final insult as Yahoo! enters it’s last days. Read more
Nov
25
2011
Back in the early days of Pay Per Click advertising Google had one of it’s usual brainwaves. It looked at Overture (which became Yahoo! Advertising) and saw that it’s direct ‘you pay more, you position higher’ approach had two main flaws:
- If the adverts in the search results were less relevant to the search term, then the search engine itself would seem to be less accurate
- If the advertising network gets paid on click-through, then to allow poor performing adverts to dominate because they’re willing to spend more means that lower revenue would be realised
So, Quality Score was Google’s smart balancing act. The premise was Read more