At PubCon Las Vegas, WebProNews spoke with David Roth, Yahoo’s Director of Search Marketing, who has an interesting perspective on the recent Microsoft/Yahoo search advertising transition (or “Search Alliance“), because not only does he work for Yahoo, he does Yahoo’s own search marketing. He’s an advertiser himself.
“It’s been really exciting to be in Yahoo while this is happening,” Roth tells WebProNews. “I mean, there’s a lot of tracking of everything that was going on, and there were daily emails going out about the transition really validating that we could make the transition evaluating quality every step of the way. So there’s really a lot of effort being put in to make sure that things went smoothly through the transition.”
“Now, for me, I’ve got kind of an unusual view on this because I am not only an advertiser, but Yahoo’s also a publisher, so we transitioned all of our advertising like everybody did,” Roth added. “So now we’re using adCenter to manage our Yahoo and our Bing buy, but we also monetize search results all over Yahoo, and so we transitioned in two different ways. So for me it was really interesting to see how metrics shift, you know, as the market place shifts, and now all the work that we have to do to try to re-optimize our campaigns and adjust to how the new ecosystem works, as opposed to the old one.”
I’m guessing that the transition could’ve gone more smoothly for some of Yahoo’s advertisers, despite all the efforts both companies took to ensure little turbulence. That’s not to say there was too much shake-up, but even Roth admits from the advertisers’ perspective, there is more that his team could’ve done.
“The thing that I noticed mostly, and [these are] kind of some basic principles or best practices, that one of the things I thought that we as advertisers could’ve done better, was to be more aggressive with what we were doing on adCenter, because we do want to make sure that all that traffic is shifting over there, and I think that when we went into it, we thought, ‘well, we’ll start with our best keywords. We’ll start with our top performers,’ but what we realized very quickly was that we really needed to move everything over there, and we needed to be as aggressive as possible in growing out our adCenter campaigns and keywords and ad groups, because we needed that in order to try to preserve the level of quantity and quality of traffic that we were getting previously,” Roth explained.
Did you run into any hiccups during the Yahoo/Microsoft advertising transition? Are there things you wish you would’ve done better? Things you wish they would’ve done better? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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