Yahoo

Yahoo! announced their Q4 ‘09 earnings on Tuesday, making their best effort to portray a 4% year over year decline in revenue as a signal of a turnaround. While that certainly beats the 12-13% declines Y! saw earlier in ‘09, there are still troubling numbers deeper in the report and in RKG’s data.

Traffic from mobile devices has grown tremendously over the last year, but the quality of that traffic may be sketchy.

Sudden drops in conversion rates can happen for a variety of reasons. Here are some tips for identifying and addressing these issues.

Has eBay been phasing out syndicated Yahoo ads in favor of Google’s? RKG records indicate a major change in the search partner landscape.

Yahoo has been testing a feature that allows advertisers to add videos, custom search boxes or images to their traditional text search ads. As presented in Beta, the program seems more aligned with Yahoo’s bottom line, than with those of their advertisers.

We’ve complimented Google here before on their efforts to improve their content network. It it nice these changes are beginning to be noticed by the get-rich-quicksters too.

One day isn’t an entire retail season, but I thought it interesting to compare CyberMonday 2008 to 2007.

As November begins, the situation has become bleaker.

We do not observe broad weakness in online sales.

The ad spend share situation by engine is essentially unchanged since last month.

“In social networks, on the other hand, users show up to find friends; ads are, at best, irrelevant to that goal.” Byran Urstadt, Tech Review

Looking at our agency’s client base in aggregate, last month Google received 79% of our clients’ ad dollars. Yahoo received 17%. Microsoft received 5%.

“But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be.” – FJY

Last week Google and Yahoo announced an agreement by which Yahoo would be allowed to selectively serve Google ads along side search results on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s partner sites, and take advantage of Google’s Content ad platform as well.

May 2008 search engine share results aggregated across RKG clients: steady, no big change. Google at 81%.

NYT reports online display advertising having a tougher time than paid search in weak economy. “The new advertisers are more cautious about requiring some sort of proof or evidence that something is working,” reports GM of WeatherChannel.

Microsoft will offer cash back to users who make purchases after using Live search. IMHO, you can’t buy user loyalty.

For the first time, Google nudges Yahoo out of the top spot as most popular US site.

Looking at Q1 numbers for our client base, Google continues to gain paid search market share.

Providing searchers what they really want also gets retailers what they really want: more sales.

March was another month where, in aggregate, Google took another tiny slice of the pie away from Yahoo.

Here’s a video from Steve Souder speaking about site speed at Google in November.

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

Tim Armstrong on the DoubleClick deal: “We are focused on uniting search and display online metrics and on improving the measurement and execution of media campaigns.”

Across our clients, from January 2008 to February 2008, Google picked up 2.3 points of ad spend share. Across our clients, comparing February 2008 to February 2007, we did not observe evidence of an advertising or sales slow-down.