Retailers Funneling More Money To Bing

Bing has managed to turn retailers’ heads in a big way.  After looking at statistics from part of 2008, SearchIgnite reported that retailers spent almost 50 percent more with Microsoft’s search engine this time around, which puts Google and Yahoo partly to shame.

What do you make of Bing’s increasing popularity?  Let us know in the comments section.

Or, to be more precise, “Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008,” according to SearchIgnite.  “Compared with Google and Yahoo!, Bing also saw better YoY click volume growth.”

Additionally, “[a]verage order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth.”

Impressive, right?  It’s only when you sort of step back for a moment that Bing’s achievements look less stunning.  That’s because, despite the progress Microsoft has made, exactly 75 percent of advertisers’ dollars went to Google during the first part of this quarter, and 16 percent headed to Yahoo.  Bing grabbed just 8 percent.

Still, some headway is better than none, and retailers are demonstrating a lot of confidence in Bing by giving it a try during the all-important holiday season.

Will retailers benefit by paying more attention to Bing?  Have your say.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts On Publisher Searches

Yahoo Survey Finds Optimism for Holiday Online Retail

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they’ll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years.

“Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger,” a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

“Only 25% expected sales to be weaker than most years (with the remaining 15% expecting sales to be weaker than most years but stronger than last year),” she adds. “After last year in which sales were plagued by the recession, this holiday season just may shape up to mark a rebound of sorts for small business online retailers.”

Some other findings from the survey include:

- The most optimistic industries are beauty and fragrances; clothing, accessories & shoes; and food – in all cases more than 40 percent think this will be a stronger year than most years.

- Several industries feel sales will be back to normal this season after being way down last year, including books and magazines, electronics, and music.

- These sectors tend to include lower cost gift options than some of the more pessimistic sectors such as computers & hardware (in which only 6% expect this year to be stronger than most years and 64% expect sales to be weaker than most years).

A recent survey from Google found that by last week, half of consumers had already begun holiday shopping. However, research from MerchantCircle found that only about 23% of merchants believe the worst of the recession is behind us.

Related Articles:

> Holiday Shoppers Want Deals Even More Than They Did Last Year

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> Good Chunk of Holiday Spending Will Be Online

Yahoo Suggests Searchers Use Other Yahoo Properties

Yahoo has started rolling out some new Search Assist features for its web search boxes. They are present in the search boxes of most Yahoo properties. For example, you can find them on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Finance.

“These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers,” explains Yahoo Search Senior Product Manager Linda Wang. “You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most.”

The features allow you to quickly get more info about movies, sports, travel destinations, stock prices, etc. For instance, you can type a stock symbol and the Search Assist layer will display real-time stock quotes, links to stock charts, and news about the company. Or you can type an athlete’s name and quickly get news, game log info, scores, schedules, etc.

In addition to these features, Yahoo has also launched the ability for Search Assist to help you navigate to different Yahoo properties, depending on your query. Let’s say you type “mail” in the search box. You will get a link to Yahoo Mail – specifically, your inbox, right in the Search Assist layer. Or you can type “news” or “U.S. News” and get a link to Yahoo News or specifically the U.S. section of Yahoo News.

Finally, Yahoo has added a “smart detection system” to Search Assist, which will take you to Yahoo Image Search or Yahoo News Search for different queries. So if you searched for “obama,” you would get quick links to an “obama” image query and an “obama” news query.

It’s hard to say how long these features will be around if Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft goes through. Bing should be replacing Yahoo search on the back-end. This might be considered a front-end frill that Yahoo keeps around though.

Related Articles:

> Following Study, Yahoo Proud Of Search Assist

> Yahoo’s Search Assist is There When you Need It

> Are You Fatigued By Search?

Major Mea Culpa Manifested in Yahoo Class Action Settlement

Today Yahoo is sending out details of a settlement in a Class Action lawsuit about its negligent and sloppy provision of partner traffic to advertisers, dating back through the Overture days and all the way back to GoTo.com, before Yahoo even owned a PPC engine. The story is presented as a minor hiccup by a couple of news outlets as of this writing. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land points to the $20 refund component, though by my reading that’s only reserved for any company that is now “out of business.”

In the letter, Yahoo makes the usual noises about a settlement not being evidence of any admission of guilt.

But the description of what advertisers give up if they opt into the class reads like a detailed overview of every nefarious practice in pay-per-click advertising sales since the beginning of recorded time. (After the jump, the cut-and-paste.)

More important than the small refund is Yahoo’s agreeing (1) to give advertisers a tool to fully control partner placement; (2) to better disclose online on the “Traffic Quality” portion of their website where traffic may come from; and (3) to enhance something called the “Click Investigation Request Tool” advertisers use to request information on specific traffic partners.

This non-admission-of-guilt will seem to many advertisers like a full recap of the often slippery relationship Yahoo has maintained with reality, especially in the realm of partner traffic. It comes as an albeit hollow victory for the many advertisers who were treated as an ATM by click arbitrageurs, rogue publishers, and Yahoo themselves.

And now for the ugly stuff:

“The Settlement will release Class members’ Released Claims against Yahoo!. The complete definition of “Released Claims” is set out in the Settlement Agreement, which is available atwww.inreyahoosettlement.com or from the Claims Administrator. In summary, and without limiting the definition of “Released Claims” set forth in the Settlement Agreement, Released Claims include any and all claims, causes of action, demands, rights, liens, obligations, suits, appeals, sums of money, accounts, covenants, contracts, controversies, attorneys’ fees and costs, expenses, losses, damages, judgments, orders, promises whatsoever, known or unknown, matured or unmatured, suspected or unsuspected, concealed or hidden, whether sounding in law, equity, bankruptcy, or in any other forum, from January 1, 2000 through and including September 22, 2009, that have been or could have been asserted in the Action. This release includes without limitation any and all claims concerning domain parking sites and pages; typosquatting sites and pages; bulk-registered domain name sites and pages; software applications; downloadable applications; pop-ups; pop-unders; “sliders”; “sidebars”; “injected ads”; adware; spyware; malware; malicious software; error implementations and pages; email campaigns; clicks that result from self-targeting; untargeted or random placements within the Distribution Network; ads displayed on sites or pages that lack any bona fide content, or any content at all; or ads shown to Internet users who have not conducted a search or viewed bona fide content related to a Yahoo! pay-per-click text advertisement.”

What if Yahoo! Search Marketing Was Smart?

I was reading Twitter today and saw Yahoo! Ads Buzz share a link to a Search Engine Watch blog post highlighting trends in paid search. Both Bing and Google keep growing year on year, whereas Yahoo! Search Marketing has just been decimated.

The shocking thing is that Yahoo! would even want to share a link that showed how badly they are losing marketshare in the paid search market. Or that they would be able to see the stats and not understand what is causing the issue, in spite of people spelling it out publicly and thousands of advertisers complaining about it.

As my buddy Sean Turner described via chat…

To break it down, yahoo gives you a feed for seobook.com & you give me a feed for turner.com. But all links that are clicked on turner.com redirect through seobook.com so that it shows up in customer logs as seobook.com If you block seobook.com, it will block ads from seobook.com, but not turner.com. The blocked domain tool works on what domains display, not on where the feed is redirected through. So if you are a customer, there is no way to know that turner.com is sending traffic (since it’s redirecting through seobook.com) and no way to block it through seobook.com since that tool only works on the domain that is actually displaying it.

I found it because we kept getting traffic from gogogo.com. We had blocked it over and over and couldn’t figure out why they kept sending us traffic. We couldn’t find our ad on their site. I went to live.com and ran a site:gogogo.com search and found that it indexed some of those landing pages that use gogogo.com as a monetization service.

Yahoo!’s lone bright spot in the search market is their BOSS service. And now they are letting BOSS syndication partners monetize with Yahoo! ads, but they are being stupid about it – forcing you to go through a 3rd party partner so they have no way to clean the good from the bad.

Economic incentives are pretty easy to understand. Let people mix in junk with good stuff and they will keep watering it down.

There is an endless supply of fraud willing to take free money.

You only need to look at this 1 chart to see how bundling syndication and scams with search causes fraudulent activity. Advertisers are not stupid (especially during recessions). Which is why they have opted to shift ad dollars away from Yahoo! toward the other search engines.

Update: It looks like as part of a class action lawsuit Yahoo! is required to create an ad distribution channel that allows option out of many of the syndication types:

“Premium Providers” means: (a) all web sites and web pages (including any microsite), software applications and other properties on the Internet that are owned or operated by Yahoo!; and, at Yahoo!’s option, (b) all parts of the Distribution Network other than: (i) domain name parking sites; (ii) bulk registration sites; (iii) “pop-up” or “pop-under” windows; (iv) typosquatting sites; (v) “sliders”; (vi) “sidebars”; (vii) “injected ads”; or (viii) unsolicited spam email.

And in spite of that they still are running BOSS syndication through a 3rd party partner.