Search Engine Boot Camp and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM)

The search engine market in New Zealand is finally starting to heat up a little…

I attended the Search Engine Boot Camp in Auckland, New Zealand last week and was impressed with the level of understanding on online search issues at the conference. While the seminars were pitched at a mixture of SEO and SEM understanding levels it was refreshing to see that some difficult questions were asked and some very useful technical points were on offer for webmasters or developers who are reasonably new to the search world.

There were a few stand-out speakers with the keynote from Craig Wax, Managing Director of Yahoo! Search Marketing in Australia and New Zealand. Craig took the attendees over the imminent launch of the Panama system from YSM for the New Zealand market. If you haven’t heard about it, Panama is the build name for a whole new approach to the YSM bid system (formerly the Overture bid system).

This new version of YSM brings in most of the tools which we expect to see from working with Google Adsense and also offers a few more. The largest change for Yahoo! is the addition of a Quality Score system, similar to Adsense, which means the bidding is no longer going to be a pure price war.

Panama is launching “in the near future” and will launch at the same time as Australia.

The key reason why the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform has not been successful to date in the New Zealand publishing market is the inability to target New Zealand only locations. In the current system advertisers are forced to target “Australia and New Zealand”. This will be a welcome change although it is likely to take some time before Panama has enough advertisers bidding for broad keywords to have the same level of cross vertical exposure that Google Adsense has in New Zealand.

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Advanced Google Operators

Google Search has many advanced operators, which are allow words with special functions available when using their search.

This is a little off topic but very useful as a reference to the advance operators on Google. I’ll be using this myself as it’s good to have a visual reference somewhere.

Here is a list of the Google advanced operator examples;

If there are any questions about these you can find out more information here.

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Updated advertising policy on Adsense

Google Adsense have updated their advertising policy with a couple of quite substantial changes.

The simplest one is the ability to add more than one (up to three) link ad units across a site. Previously these have only been allowed as one link ad unit per page. With the high click-through rates received from link ad units when correctly placed on a website, this will be a popular move with online advertisers (in all markets including NZ).

Conversely I have already read a few blog posts where other bloggers are saying this is pushing the Adsense program too close to the situation where a user is being tricked into a click (due to the similarity between the link ad unit format and a typical navigational function within a site).

Probably the biggest change is that Google is now requiring its Adsense publishers to conform to Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines which it uses for Adwords advertisers. From Adsense;

…you might already be familiar with these guidelines, which are intended to provide a better experience for users, advertisers, and publishers alike. If you use any kind of online advertising, know that these guidelines encourage publishers to, among other things, create sites with simple navigation and substantial, useful content.

Many different elements go into a “Quality Score” which are based around a very well established although incredibly subjective ideas on usability and content control. For example;

Starting with your ad, each interaction you have with your potential and existing customers should be geared towards building a trusting relationship. To avoid leading users astray:

* Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
* Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
* Deliver products, goods, and services as promised on your site.

The key question here will be the implementation of decisions from Google representatives. No two Google reps are likely to see the same site in the same light. Hopefully there are some very tight guidelines around more than one person being involved in removing a site.

As you can imagine, it’s going to be the almighty dollar that rules the decision on how the site is dealt with. If you’re making Google a fortune through Adsense I would expect a friendly phone call to discuss your usability however for all of the “for Adsense” sites which have been built up over the last few years, watchout!

See more details directly from Google here.

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Further discussion on duplicate affiliate programs…

I was emailed recently regarding my previous post on my annoyance surrounding offering duplicate affiliate programs on a sign-on page and thought it would be worth further publishing my response here.

Here are the details from the email. Hopefully the person concerned does not mind the post going public as I believe this type of discussion is exactly what the New Zealand Affiliate Market needs to shape-up it’s thinking. Both views have good merit and until these things are worked out for the specific NZ demographic then the affiliate market will continue to struggle;

I’m writing in regards to your post “Duplicate Affiliate Programs”.

Let me explain why merchants do this.

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network. And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

If the merchant was to join only one affiliate network, that merchant would miss out on advertising from affiliates who are members of a different affiliate network and are not interested in joining any other affiliate network.

And why should merchants only support one network?

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing. It’s like telling a manufacturer that you won’t buy their product because their confusing you by supplying it to too many different retailers. How lame is that?

Perhaps you just didn’t understand the concept.

Thanks for your comments although I believe you mis-understand my original point as well as my experience and understanding of the affiliate market :)

There are a couple of things to tackle here in a response.

Firstly the email suggests;

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network

This appears to be a good part of the premise for the email and mis-understanding.

My opinion (based on discussions with many affiliates at conferences internationally) is that affiliates are joined with many networks at any one time in order to give themselves the maximum opportunity to promote relevant products. Granted, there are some affiliates who will say that they will only ever promote products from one network due to the specific reporting or tracking that network has however in my experience this is often bluster from the affiliate, they are usually joined to other networks as well with a preference to the one they are promoting. The key point here is that the dollar rules. If an affiliate can see that the relevant product they know will work on their site is only available through another network then they are most likely to join that network as well.

On the statement;

And why should merchants only support one network?

This is a very good question. My initial post was not suggesting that merchants should only join a single network in every scenario, it was suggesting that they should not be pushing all networks they are a part of, as well as their own program on the same page as it creates a confusing decision for specifically a new affiliate who is not part of one of these networks.

I do believe that an affiliate program should be very selective in the affiliate networks it may join, for example it would not be my suggestion to join more than one affiliate network in the same geographical market (e.g. the New Zealand market). Creating partners of your affiliate networks is a strong necessity in this situation and I would freely admit that the New Zealand affiliate market is just not mature enough yet to have strong affiliate network partners who are promoting the affiliate programs in the way they should.

If an affiliate program is part of a network and they are looking for affiliates who they believe are part of a different network then it is in the best interests of the affiliate network to work closely with that partner to source the affiliate concerned.

Finally;

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing.

I couldn’t agree more and do not believe any affiliate should do this. It is counter-productive to the whole idea of building the highest returning business online that the affiliate can!

My problem with the program in question revolved more around usability and the way in which an affiliate program offers its wares to the affiliate. In this case I was in a rush, wasn’t already joined to the networks offered and didn’t have the time to research which option was the best (e.g. which offered the higher %).

If the program had promoted its own internal program first on its site with logos for the networks having a lower weight on the visual display of the site (just to show they were part of that network if you recognised the logo and would prefer that option) then I would have had an easy choice. I was there to sign-up and would have if I knew which network / program was my best option.

On the question of negotiating a higher affiliate percentage;

And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

This type of statement is exactly the reason why I didn’t sign-up to the program that day. How would I as an affiliate know (without researching every term and condition on every network) that I could only receive an increased percentage through high traffic levels by joining the affiliate program of the site itself? Affiliate percentages should be negotiable based on traffic levels irrelevant of the network the affiliate is part of. In this case I would have joined the program through a network that I happened to be already signed up to and would have there and then made the wrong choice based purely on the way the options were presented.

If you have any thoughts related to this I would be happy to post them on here. Just email affiliate@nzbase.com.

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