Category Archives: SEM

yahoo still doesn’t get it even with panama

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 8, 2007 View Comments

I am fairly experienced with SEM having managed grown an SEM budget from $100 a day a few years ago to hundreds of thousands dollars a month across every conceivable search engine and contextual platform from Google to Kanoodle and everything in between.

Because of the size of their traffic – the two most important SEM platforms are Google and Yahoo.  And historically Google’s adwords system blew the doors off of Yahoo’s old, out-dated overture based system.  Google offered an easy to use but sophisticated platform that would allow me to get a new campaign up and running in minutes (and earning money for Google), while Yahoo’s out-dated overture platform was clunky, slow and required HUMAN approval which could literally take 2-3 weeks to get a new campaign or ad approved.  This created 2 huge issues – Yahoo was leaving huge amounts of money (likely hundreds and millions of dollars – how do you like them apples yahoo shareholders?) by not running ads while google was running the same ad because yahoo was too damn slow in approving ads and second optimization of ads was next to impossible on yahoo because it making changes was too painful in terms of time to make it worthwhile.  And in fairness – the new panama platform was built to addresss both issues which from my playing around seems to have solved.

BUT and there’s a HUGE but here… Yahoo still doesn’t get it.  Yahoo unfortunately still charges a minimum cpc of 10 cents.  Whereas up in Mountain View, Google charges as little as a 1 cent for a cpc.  I am sure some of you are saying – yahoo’s smart for charging a higher price because that means more money.  Wrong.  What it does is that it limits the words that someone can advertise on yahoo around – goodbye long tail of keyword’s (kw’s).  The more kw’s you use in a search campaign the lower value those outlying kw’s have to you.  And unless your making more money then the kw is costing you, then you won’t use it.  And so Yahoo artificially limits the amount of kw’s an advertiser will be willing to bid on if they had no minimum bid.  So until Yahoo truly embraces the lessons of Google’s advertising system, it is pretty easy to say Yahoo just doesn’t get it yet.

Where do laws come from? (The Utah Story)

Posted by Todd Sawicki on April 10, 2007 View Comments

Thanks for John Battelle and Eric Goldman for pointing out Utah’s rediculous attempt to save businesses from the vagueries of competition.   In a prior role, I had the good fortune to meet and get to know Eric.  Eric’s a really smart legal professor who has to be one of the leading legal experts with regards to online advertising law, regulation and legal theory.  So I tend to agree with Eric’s reasoning on issues like Utah banning Keyword (“KW”) advertising.  Let’s see, let’s ban the holy grail of online advertising, hmmm, yeah that’s a good idea.  If I were a SEM firm in Salt Lake, then I might think about relocating to friendlier climes lest you be labeled an outlaw or worse a criminal enterprise. 

Having worked in the online and keyword based advertising for a number of years, this issue has its roots a long way back.  From stories that I have been told, this dates back to what can only be best described as a holy war between Whenu  and 1-800-Contacts.  The story goes like this (and having told it to be people familiar with the Utah lobbying scene and online internet advertising law-making no one has ever thought it to be untrue so I tend to believe their must be a seed of truth to the story).  1-800-contacts sued Whenu for KW targeting ads against 1-800-contacts web site.  Unable to win in court, 1-800-contacts, a Utah based company, pleaded its case to the Utah legislature with a large amount (all legal) of donations to the Utah legislature.  This lagresse resulted in an anti-Whenu bill effectively banning Whenu’s targeted ads being shown to Utah users.  Unfortunately based on the dollars and sob story of how 1-800-contacts business was being ruined by Whenu, they also got Utah to ban KW based targeted ads in the same bill (collateral damage).  Fortunately, 1-800-contacts ability to buy legislation has its limits as the bill was ultimately overturned in federal courts.

And not having learned it’s lesson the first time,  Utah is back again trying to save the world from KW advertising with a its most recent legislative volley.  It will be interesting to see when Utah’s legislature finally wakes up from the trance of its business backers to realize the folly they have been lead on.  If Utah was being considered for a Google server-plex anytime soon, I have to imagine this killed any of those thoughts.

Update: ClickZ does a little investigation into the motives of this law and seems to corroborate my story about Whenu and 1-800-contacts.  Amazing how easy it is to buy a law if you were to believe the story.