Yahoo Adds Feature to Import Google Adwords Campaigns

I just scanned the last six posts here at MP and they all have the Google logo attached to them. What’s strange about this story is that while Yahoo is announcing an improvement in their paid search offering it still relates to Google. As for bing? Where are you? The company that is having their search platform replaced by you is making more noise.

So what has Yahoo done? It has created an easy way for users of the Yahoo paid search platform to import data from their Google Adwords campaigns. In other words, Yahoo is saying “We know how much you use Google Adwords so just ‘copy and paste’ it to us and spend with us. Please!” MediaPost reports on this and let’s us hear Yahoo’s version.

Despite the agreement with Microsoft to power the search engine’s backend infrastructure, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo continues to invest in advertising and consumer search tools. This time the company is releasing Network Distribution, and Import Campaigns.

David Pann, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Search Advertising, tells Online Media Daily that Yahoo’s investment in targeting tools provides another option for advertisers to reach consumers — an alternative to Google AdWords. So the hope is that these tools will end up in Microsoft’s search platform and adCenter.

Boy, if that doesn’t sound like someone who has simply decided to bow to the superiority of Google’s offering and settle for the crumbs from its table. By saying that Yahoo’s Search Advertising provides another option (read: something other than Google AdWords) it sounds like Mr. Pann is trying to remind people that “Hey, we do paid search advertising too!”

While this is all well and good one has to wonder what the impact will be for Yahoo if any. The following example provided from the article tells the tale much better than I can.

One of the biggest complaints from advertisers has been the tedious process of importing online campaigns into more than one search platform. Each engine relies on different types of files and formats. Many advertisers such as Brad Butler, chief operating officer at Asadart Ecommerce Specialty Shops, begin their campaigns on Google, simply because AdWords has been easier to understand and use.

“Nice idea, but at the end of the day I want results,” were the first words out of Butler’s mouth after hearing about the new features.

Butler runs several online stores. “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig,” he says. “It’s a good idea, but I remember talking to my rep about it a few years ago. Hey, guys, you’re three years late to the party.”

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I can smell a “So what?!” response from a mile away. How about we let Mr. Butler put it in even clearer business English, the one that involves dollar signs.

Butler’s Yahoo account reps used to import AdWords files for him. The rep would come back a week later after completing the job. It just took too long, he says. That’s one reason that last year, Butler spent about $50,000 with Yahoo, compared with $1.2 million with Google.

I have to guess that Mr. Butler won’t be moving a lot of that spend over to Yahoo but that’s just me. Well, while I am glad that at least someone else is trying to do something in the search space I hope that there might be a little more innovation and less playing catch up in the future.

Search advertisers weigh in on this and just how much you use other paid search options outside of Google. The world needs to see if there is a pulse on the industry outside of the Googleplex.

4 Comparison Search Tools You May Not Know About … But Should

I may be the only one who noticed, but it seems to me that 2009 saw an unusual amount of new comparison search tools released. Perhaps it was the launch of Bing, or the growth of real-time search? I don’t know, but something inspired programmers to develop new tools and sites to let us compare [...]

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iCrossing: Google’s Share Of Search Almost 77 Percent

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are “based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals,” which use its search tracking tools.
Accordingly the [...]

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Five More Search Tools You Should Know: Twitter Edition

It’s time for another in our occasional series of search tool roundups, but this one is more focused than previous articles: Rather than look at a variety of random search tools, I’ll introduce you to a handful of Twitter search tools that may have flown under your radar until now. You’ll learn how to search [...]

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Bing’s New Mobile Voice Search Available On New Samsung Phone

The Bing Search Blog has announced a new mobile voice search capability that competes with, and even one-ups the more well known mobile voice search tools from Google.
The Bing voice search tool has three capabilities:

search Bing by speaking a query
dial a contact’s phone by speaking the number
compose a text message by speaking it

As eWeek’s Google [...]

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Valuable Customer Insights Via Search Engine Tools

Forget about your seo investment. Disregard your PPC budget. B2B marketers should be asking themselves, “Am I getting all I can from search engines… for free?” Consider this: searching is the second most popular online activity today — second only to email. In fact, comScore (August 2009) estimates that Google alone handles [...]

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Yahoo: Pay No Attention to the 10 Year Search Deal: Look at What’s New on Delicious!

Not to be all Wizard-of-Oz on us, but Yahoo really doesn’t want us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (Steve Ballmer). No, they want to focus us on their new SERP and their new Delicious search tools and fresh bookmarks.

Don’t you worry—don’t think for one moment that I, the paragon of journalistic integrity, could be distracted so easily from decrying Yahoo’s abdication of control over its search—ooh, shiny emailing and tweeting tools!

So Delicious does have some cool new stuff to show off—and maybe it’s not just a distraction ploy. Maybe it’s a ploy to remind us that Yahoo can still do cool new stuff.

Anyway, Delicious has a new search tool to help its users find bookmarks (theirs and others’) more easily. Yahoo says “with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.”

Delicious has also added a feature to highlight new and popular bookmarks—but not on the Delicious site. The Fresh Bookmarks tab on the homepage features up-and-coming bookmarks (gee, no other social site has ever done that )—the bookmarks that are most popular on Twitter (as opposed to the most popular bookmarks on Delicious, which are under the Popular Bookmarks tab).

On this new feature yesterday, the Delicious blog quotes Wired, who touted the predecessor app, TweetNews, as possibly “the best mashup we’ve ever seen.” Hopefully the Delicious version gets the same positive reception.

Finally, Delicious also added more social features to the add bookmark page. You can add recipients in the Send field—and get the option to email or even tweet bookmarks.

Delicious looks to be doing a good job of adapting to the most popular social site with the media today, instead of decrying Twitter as a poor man’s competitor.

What do you think? Will these new features be enough to keep Delicious users happy—and relying on Delicious? Or does this just push more users toward Twitter?

Report: ChaCha Voice Search Beats Google, Yahoo/Vlingo In Accuracy, Reliability

A new report finds that mobile search and answers service ChaCha beat Google and Yahoo’s voice search tools in terms of overall accuracy and reliability across a range of query types in a controlled study. The study was conducted by Albright Communications/MSearchGroove in January of this year.
The report, which can be downloaded from the ChaCha [...]

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Five More Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else? Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to [...]

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