Yahoo let’s users no longer be part of The System
We’re all aware that search engine’s and their related services, such as those offered by Yahoo! and Google, basically come to the consumer for kind-of-free. I say the kind-of- part because you’re actually exchanging two things for those free services.
- User Data
- Visiting advertisers
It’s basically the same model that free-to-air television works from. You have advertisers pay for the bulk, if not all, of your costs and then sell whatever statistical data you have on top of it to other marketing companies, or directly to advertisers themselves in the form of more expensive advertising due to greater degrees of targeting.
Which makes Yahoo’s latest offering somewhat odd: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/
The Yahoo Ad Interest Manager allows users to basically select which type of advertising they’re interested in, which is a good thing as it means they receive more relevant ads of a more relevant nature, which technically should mean better CTRs and conversion rates. But the bad part is that they let some users opt out entirely.
Now, Yahoo users have been proven time and again to be less savvy than users of other search engines. The reasons for that are unimportant. But this does technically shrink the pool a bit of users who are going to see you ads if you’re doing PPC campaigns on Yahoo and its partners’ platforms.
Now, I could be jumping the gun a bit here, but I think this is most likely going to be a good thing.
Given that the users of Yahoo are universally less savvy, it means that you’re getting a kind of reverse Darwinism going on, where the ones smart enough to not have purchased anything shown to them on the advertising platform anyway are basically going to opt out. This should lead to a higher CTR, which means a lower CPC. This leaves behind the more easily influenced and naive people who were entirely unaware that opting out was even an option or, better yet, those that actually want to see advertisements within specific categories!
If you’re advertising by PPC, but not currently using Yahoo, I’d recommend giving it a look into in a few weeks when more people have started to use this feature set.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
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