A important news you need to know how this deal will effect your advertising effort moving forward with the 2 biggest Giants of Internet.

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

Yahoo Inc. agreed Thursday to a search-advertising deal with rival Google Inc. just hours after announcing that Microsoft Corp. was no longer in the picture.

Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), based in Sunnyvale, said the nonexclusive pact with Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) enables it to run Google ads alongside its search results and on some of its Web properties in the U.S. and Canada.

“We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry,” Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang said in a statement. “Our strategies are specifically designed to capitalize on this convergence — and this agreement helps us move them forward in a significant way.”

Yahoo leaders said they hope the deal could generate as much as $800 million a year.

Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo will select the search term queries for which — and the pages on which — Yahoo may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo will define its users’ experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search and also applies to current partners in Yahoo’s publisher network.

Analysts say in essence the Yahoo will be a reseller of Google ads.

Yahoos shares plunged after the announcement that Redmond,Wash.-based Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) walked away from an offer to buy a portion of Yahoo. They dropped 10 percent, or $2.63, to $23.52 by Thursday’s closing bell and declined as much as 7 percent more in Friday trading.

Start building position now as shares of Yahoo are now backdown to before their January earning announcement.

Andy Huang

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Google Adwords Deparment will be offering free Webinar over the next two weeks. These Webinar will covering Google Print Ads and Google Audio Ads. Traditional media ads can drive more traffic and conversions to your website, all from customers that are local to your business – in these webinars it will cover different ways to expand the Adwords advertising reach with print and audio ads, including how to get started and best practices to be used once your campaigns are up and running.

Here are links and dates to both of the webinars:

• Google Audio Ads: Wednesday, June 11. Sign up here.
• Google Print Ads: Wednesday, June 18. Sign up here.

To your success!

Andy Huang

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Here is an interesting write up from TechCrunch by Michael Arlington of Fox Group is seeking alternative and might terminate the deal they have with Google. Original quote below.

Even while parent company News Corp. continues to try to disrupt the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is rumored to be in negotiations with Microsoft take Google’s place as the MySpace advertising partner.

The Google-FIM deal, first announced in August 2006, obligated Google to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to FIM of at least $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments. But the original deal was negotiated in extreme haste, say people with knowledge of the deal. In February 2007 the parties were rumored to be working on the final agreement, months after ads were already being served by Google.

In Google’s haste to keep the deal from Microsoft they may have paid more than they can stomach.

According to our source, Sergey Brin’s thinly veiled buyer’s remorse verbalized during Google’s most recent earnings call on January 31 angered News Corp./FIM execs:

We don’t talk about individual partners’ performance or anything like that. Now I do want to highlight though, we have had a challenge in Q4 with social networking inventory as a whole and some of the monetization work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped. But we are continuing the efforts and we are still optimistic about future quarters.

…we have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the MySpace relationship, including of course Orkut, our own network, which is very, very successful and probably like 20 others, or something like that. I don’t know the exact number. But we have an incredible amount of this inventory and in fact, it varies quite a bit in how it all monetizes, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.
…I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet. We’re running lots of experiments. We had some significant improvements but as I said, some of the things we were working on in Q4 didn’t really pan out and there were some disappointments there. I hope to be able to report more progress in the future but it’s a big opportunity because it’s so much inventory.

The vast majority of social network traffic that Google serves ads into is controlled by MySpace - this was a direct complaint about that deal. Shortly thereafter, our source says, FIM started discussions with Microsoft about taking over the advertising inventory. Microsoft announced a guaranteed payments deal with Facebook just two weeks after the initial FIM/Google deal. I’m sure they’d be very happy to get their hands on MySpace traffic, too. And if anyone has more money to burn than Google, it’s Microsoft.

What we don’t know is what kind of termination clauses are included in the existing agreement. But Google seems to be saying publicly that they wish they had never entered the deal. Perhaps now, with Microsoft waiting on the sidelines waiting to play sugar daddy, MySpace will suddenly be sexy again.

Very interesting to see if Microsoft/Yahoo would be the right replacement if the deal turns for Google. Keep an eye out.

Andy Huang

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Google’s Inside AdWords crew Feng, posted an update on InsideAdwords and share the following Optimizer tips.

The Conversion Optimizer is a bidding feature that allows you to set a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) instead of a maximum cost-per-click (CPC), helping you save time and maximize profits. We recently held a series of Conversion Optimizer webinars, which you can watch on YouTube. To help you get more out of your Conversion Optimizer campaigns, we’ve compiled a list of top tips based on the most common questions we received from our webinar attendees.

1. A campaign must have 200 or more conversions per month as tracked by AdWords conversion tracking to be eligible for the Conversion Optimizer. If none of your campaigns reach this level, check out these tips to increase your conversion numbers.
2. Conversion Optimizer works on a campaign level, not at the account level. You can enable Conversion Optimizer for eligible campaigns by following these steps. Keep in mind that you can’t use Conversion Optimizer with a brand new campaign — it needs the conversion history to work correctly.
3. Once you activate the Conversion Optimizer, you should check its performance periodically to ensure that it’s delivering what you expect. Keep in mind that normal variations in campaign performance can make it difficult to interpret short-term changes. You can change your bids as often as you like.
4. The Conversion Optimizer works on a maximum CPA, not an average CPA. While we aim to avoid any conversion that costs more than your maximum CPA bid, changes in your conversion rate may cause your average CPA to exceed your maximum CPA.
5. Keep in mind that if you choose a CPA lower than the recommended maximum CPA bid, you are likely to get less traffic than you did with your old CPC bids. It’s a good idea to start with this recommendation and adjust based on the results you observe.
6. If you choose to opt out of the Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will revert to the previous CPC bids you were using. (So, there’s nothing to stop you from giving it a try!)
7. Conversion Optimizer campaigns cannot yet be modified with the AdWords Editor, but we’re aware that this is a common request from our advertisers.
8. The Conversion Optimizer does not work with Google Analytics conversion data, but it’s fine to use AdWords conversion tracking and Analytics at the same time.
9. The tool does not impact your keywords’ Quality Score, which is calculated in the usual way regardless of the bidding option you are using.
10. It’s best not to turn on the Conversion Optimizer for the first time right after you’ve made major changes to a campaign, as your conversion rate may not have yet stabilized to reflect the updates. Similarly, while you are running the Conversion Optimizer, it’s best to avoid major campaign changes that are likely to impact conversion rate (or to pay careful attention after making them to evaluate their impact).

We hope this information has piqued your interest about the Conversion Optimizer. Please visit the Conversion Optimizer website for more information, including FAQs and details for upcoming webinars.”

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Andy Huang

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