Yahoo! Mimics Google
Well if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Google must be feeling pretty special this week after Yahoo’s announcement.
Yahoo announced that they would be introducing a quality score into their online advertising program.These are the ads that appear on Yahoo properties when you do a search.Like Google has been doing for years, Yahoo has decided to introduce a quality score, which basically means where an ad appears on the page will no longer be purely a case of how much you bid for a particular key phrase.
Where your ads appear on Google has more to do with not only how much you pay for each key phrase but also your click through rate and the quality of your landing page.The click through rate is how many times your and appears versus how many times it is clicked on.The better your click through rate the less you will have to pay to appear higher on the page.The logic of a quality score does make sense, for both user and search engine.If an ad is being clicked on a lot of for a particular search it must be fairly relevant to that search and given that the search engine is only going to get paid when someone clicks on an ad, they want the ads at the top of the page that are being clicked on the most.
It seems the Yahoo has only just realised the value of a quality score.Although I can’t see how it’s going to help them in Australia.According to our own data from the last 12 months Yahoo generates less than 5% of search traffic in Australia.Not only that but Yahoo has had the same technical issues for the last seven years and has not been able to resolve them.Specifically I am talking about why Yahoo Australia keeps turning into Yahoo UK!This has been going on in Australia ever since Yahoo launched.It seems to turn up mainly in the my Yahoo section.As I used to provide a lot of content to Yahoo back in the late 90s, I can remember having the same conversation with them then, they assured me it was a temporary bug that was being solved, however just the other day I was trying to use my Yahoo and some of its new features and after entering my details I ended up at the Yahoo UK site.
I am guessing Yahoo is getting more dollars out of the JV with Channel 7 than what Channel 7 is.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
