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To All,
I am creating this informational site in the hopes of discussing issues that I believe are important and where I hope to add value to any ongoing discussions. Please if you find any area of this site that you feel strongly about, contact me through the contact me link below. I will read all entries and promise to consider your ideas. Thank you, Kurt Artecona |
| 1/02/2007 | This is my first entry and I look forward to working on this site with enthusiasm and positive intensions. YAHOO's tricky M.O. About two weeks ago I was notified by a colleague of mine, Mike Catania, that Yahoo had been using "Partner Sites" in a new and unusual way. A Yahoo partner site is a web site that is (for practical purposes) in the Yahoo network. If you ask Yahoo about this directly like I did, they might tell you as they told me that a partner site is a search site like CNN. I have found through experience and research that this is rarely the case. Many of their partner sites are not search sites at all, but actually directory sites that have no purpose except to point you to sponsored links or as they sometimes call them "search resources". Sites such as loanforsmallbusiness.info are likely to be Yahoo partners. They house hundreds of Yahoo customer listings and are tracked by Overture. The reason I can't formally state that they are Yahoo partners is due to the fact that although Yahoo admits to having partners such as loanforsmallbusiness.info, they will not acknowledge it formally. There is no published list of partners that I am aware of. I have asked Yahoo for a published list and they have ignored my request several times. If you click on any of the listing you will be redirected by the Overture system to a Yahoo PPC client. Here is a sample a redirect URL found in loanforsmallbusiness.info today January 02, 2007: http://rc12.overture.com/d1/sr/?xargs=15KPjg1ydSt5Xyl_Another important fact about Yahoo partner sites is that unlike Yahoo's "Content Match" system you can't turn them off when running a Yahoo PPC campaign. Loanforsmallbusiness.info for example pays Google to be in Google's paid search results. They bid on many competitive terms but from what I have uncovered in my research they only pay the minimum and show up for thousands of terms at the tail end of the sponsored results. If you search for a term in Google completely unrelated to your industry and click from Google's sponsored listing area into a site such as www.loanforsmallbusiness.info you will or should generate a 10 cent marketing fee for Google. Once you are in www.loanforsmallbusiness.info however you will see hundred of listings there maybe your own as well. If you click on any of them you could potentially generate much higher fees for those listed in that site. This creates additional ad revenue for Yahoo. If you are working for a company that carefully tracks key terms and their respective specific performance, you will find your results to be skewed by the fact that many of the visitors coming to your site will be arriving there from completely unpredictable, unsupervised channels and by having searched for terms completely unrelated to the search terms you carefully researched, tested and paid for. What is even worse is that you might make serious business decisions based on this poor data. Garbage in Garbage out as they say in the computing world. Anyway back to the story: Mike had noticed that one of our clients had started receiving thousands of clicks from seventeen different sites that neither he nor I had any previous knowledge of or relationship with. After investigating the log files through our company’s analytics system we were able to determine that the traffic was not converting into sales--at least not at normal percentage levels. All of the conversion-challenged sites were found to be Yahoo partner sites. Historically, our client’s site converts on the average of 28% of all recorded visitors, conversions being defined as the completion of an income generating financial application. We had recorded increased Yahoo PPC traffic on all our sites and observed that Yahoo PPC conversion rates have been decreasing at the same time. Yahoo PPC results had dropped by over 10% in seven months time while the cost of this traffic had increased 65%. What is also unusual is that in the same time period that we saw the 10% PPC conversion drop we had been able to increase conversion rates for natural search results by 2.5% through better design and copy improvements. Once we had completed our initial analysis we sought to verify our findings. We utilized Clicktracks and followed the path of visitors from the Yahoo partner sites and found that 99% only clicked our home page before leaving the site. The average time spent on our site by these unqualified visitors was 22 seconds while our average for all other visitors was over 120 seconds. An example of one of the websites is http://www.wealthygeek.com. We had received 4500 visitors from this site with only 6 converting into applicants. We normally would have expected to have received 900 applications from this amount of Yahoo traffic. Since we notified Yahoo about this the site it seems to no longer function as it did when we discovered this problem. However Yahoo will neither confirm nor deny that http://www.wealthygeek.com was or is a partner site. My concern is that Yahoo is costing my client hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and they don't seem to have anything to say that would at all justify or even explain their choices and strategy. I am somewhat disappointed to say the least. I have been a fan of Yahoo and hoped that they would provide real competition for Google. Competition is the engine that drives innovation. This new strategy seems very short-sighted to me. In my mind they will not be able to compete with Google without real visionary leadership that thinks long-term. If you contact Yahoo about this you will likely receive this email in response as four of our clients did. It is their boilerplate response: If you are able to verify or disprove the relationship between these sites and Yahoo I would be very grateful with your sharing the information you find. |