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Can Yahoo! Get Smart Right?
By: David Honig 2007-07-11 After everything I've seen about Yahoo! SmartAds, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. For years the search giants have been sitting on a wealth of behavioral data and doing absolutely nothing with it.
Meanwhile, advertisers and their agencies have been clamoring louder and louder for the engines to offer targeting based on that search query data. However, I don't for a minute imagine that this new program will be without its fair share of roadblocks. With every great new technology that makes sense in this incredible business we are in, there are multiple great ideas that fail. Yahoo cannot afford for this program to fail. Data is king, and serving relevant ads at the right time is the key to success. I can think of three things that Yahoo will need to do to make sure that their ad serving is relevant and timely. First, they have to sort users into "data buckets" by user behavior and set appropriate time limits for serving ads to users in those buckets. Second, they have to build relationships with their users. And third, they need to understand when not to serve ads against search behavior. Let's start with an example. When my wife was looking for maternity clothes 7 months ago, it would have been relevant to serve her offers on maternity clothes. It then makes sense for Yahoo! to put her in a "young mother" data bucket. They might even want to segment her into a sub-category of young mother by what sort of maternity clothes she prefers, high-end retailers or mass merchant. Yahoo! would need to understand, however, that nine months later, maternity clothes are not going to be relevant for my wife, or anyone else in her data bucket, and stop serving ads. When one door closes, however, another door opens. My wife may not be looking for maternity clothes anymore, but she probably is interested in baby toys, baby clothes, and maybe even products in completely different verticals, like life insurance and financial planning. Yahoo! could then show users in that data bucket offers for products that they are likely to be interested in, although they may not have specifically searched for. We agency folks speak about lifetime customer value to our advertisers on a daily basis. Perhaps Yahoo should also speak of their user based on lifetime value and different interests and needs as time goes on. Yahoo needs to build the relationship with their users and with the proper offers delivered, their users should respond well. A lot of this will come down to restraint on Yahoo's part. They need to avoid cluttering up pages, and avoid being too blatant with their ads. Showing this kind of taste should lead to users not minding being targeted based on their personal data. But, of course, there will be times when Yahoo! will need to avoid targeting ads based on user behavior-the third thing that they need to do to make sure that their ads are relevant and timely. Many households in America share computers. Further, many users make search queries and visit Yahoo! on computers that belong to someone else. One nightmare scenario that could result from SmartAds might look like this. Suppose a man was shopping online to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. Later, the girlfriend goes online using the boyfriend's computer and finds the Web littered with ads for discounts on diamond rings. I would think Yahoo would be responsible for letting the cat out of the bag, and a poor choice of ad delivery. Therefore, as much as it hurts, Yahoo may want to only observe certain data and not serve ads against it. They'll need to be careful in choosing when, and when not, to serve ads. Don't get me wrong, I think this has the potential to be a real win for savvy advertisers and publishers. The key will be making consumers like it. If Yahoo! can do that by keeping messages relevant and timely, this could be a huge step in the evolution of the ad industry. I hope it is, as I would hate for this to be yet another great idea that goes bust. Tag: Yahoo Have a bookmark! -  View All Articles by David Honig About the Author: David Honig is the Vice President of Media Services of Did-it Search Marketing. You can reach him at dhonig@did-it.com. |
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