Less than a month after Yahoo pulled the plug on their popular Paid Inclusion program. The company has decided to outsource its shopping engine to PriceGrabber. This decision to exit the shopping engines won’t come as too much of a shock to those in the industry given Yahoo’s future plans with search advertising. However, it is surprising that they decided to give this business to PriceGrabber over Microsoft’s platform, Bing Shopping.

Perhaps Yahoo believes that by giving Microsoft their shopping business, they will eventually become too dependent on them. Either way, it should be interesting to see how this will play out for all parties involved.

Most importantly is how this will affect the advertisers. My suggestion would be to stay ahead of the game and open an account with PriceGrabber directly. Be ready to capture the major shift in traffic as the largest shopping engine outsources all their traffic to a direct a comparison shopping site. By advertising through these types of engines you have the ability to reach a more qualified audience.
 

 

Despite the recent announcement of a Yahoo-MSN search deal, Yahoo continues to make news with updates to their advertising platform. Now they have announced the addition of mobile ads for iPhones, iPod Touches, and Android phones.

The twist to this is that Yahoo did not imply that these ads would be compatible with any Windows Mobile Devices. So MSN was basically left off of this new Yahoo revenue stream… very interesting.

Finally, and more importantly, how does this affect current Yahoo advertisers? If you are currently running a campaign in Yahoo, your ads have been automatically set up to start running as of September 29th. 2009. For some businesses this is great, for others this may result in unqualified traffic. I would recommend anyone running a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign to check out your campaign settings now and monitor how these changes are affecting your overall results.

Only time will tell how much revenue this means to Yahoo and how much cost this means to the advertiser.

Google has recently launched a preview of their new tool, Caffeine. This program provides a developer preview allowing webmasters and power searchers the ability to give feedback on organic search results. In short, we will get to weigh in on Google’s algorithmic changes before they are launched.

So will this new tool affect your Google AdWords campaigns? According to Google, and an interview with Matt Cutts, the answer is simple; No. However, as a Search Engine Marketer, I believe we can use the information being provided from Caffeine to make smarter choices with our PPC campaigns. Unlike with past algorithm updates, we are able to get a preview of how our own listings will look. As we all know, SEO results are long-term and can take some time to change. If your positions drop due to these updates, it is your SEM campaigns that will immediately accommodate for these shifts that we are likely to see in organic results.

Creating a new campaign aimed at top positions for certain keywords that may be affected is a great way to combat an organic drop in visibility. With Google’s Caffeine we can be one step ahead of the curve in proactively selecting keywords to bid on. Be sure to check out this tool so that you can create a strong PPC campaign to quickly reclaim your presence.