Mon 4 Jun 2007
I had a chance to speak with folks from both Marchex (who runs Enhance) and Yahoo at the SEMX conference here in Seattle on Monday to clarify what was meant by the Enhance press release on Monday. My original thoughts when I first read the release are below - this is a correction post. What is going on is that advertisers can now buy some Yahoo text placements through Enhance. Yahoo has backfilled some places that they can’t or won’t fill with their own text ads, with ads from Enhance. So, what does this mean:
- Depending on your business and keyword sets, you can get into areas of Yahoo that you have been unable to before.
- Within Enhance, you will not be able to track these placements distinctly - the results will be combined with the other Enhance clicks.
- Without knowing where the placements are, it is impossible to project whether the quality will be good or not. In general, Yahoo! performs a lot better for my clients than Enhance so it might be good for Enhance quality.
- You can get these clicks at a “better ROI” than Yahoo! This can really only mean a lower cost per click. If it is a lower cost per click, this must mean that the Enhance and Yahoo! placements will be competing in some areas - why would Yahoo! do that?
All in all, a pretty confusing relationship that may or may not help the folks using Enhance. At the very least, it makes me interested in testing them again. Hopefully, their quality has improved.
1) Enhance quality of traffic is spotty at best. In testing I've done, the quality of the clicks generated for B 2 C clients were moderate to poor. The traffic quality was even worse for B 2 B clients. I've read that Enhance has performed OK for other people, but have never seen a ringing endorsement from anyone.
2) The fact that this traffic will get bundled into Yahoo! search syndication only increases my concern with the overall quality of Yahoo! traffic. Currently, there is no way to bid separately on the Yahoo.com domain vs their search syndicated partners (you have this ability in Google). I'm sure that this hurts the overall click quality of Yahoo's program and would REALLY like to have the ability to opt out of their search syndicate program. Even better would be the ability to track the syndicates individually and be able to turn them on or off by client depending on quality.
3) Adding in the Panama platform to Enhance might help the performance of the ads on Enhance due to the multiple creatives, but if we can't track which creative is performing better on Enhance vs the rest of Yahoo! - what's the point?
Anyhow, I really hope Yahoo! gets it's act together.