Up until this announcement, it was Yahoo’s policy that you couldn’t send sponsored traffic to a site that you did not own, even if you had a working affiliate agreement with the merchant to do so. This policy has not always been implemented across the board; I have been able to get direct link ads up in YSM for years, but this policy would often rear its ugly head at the worst times, after all the work was done. Yahoo has shut down entire accounts of mine in the past in an effort to enforce this ill-advised policy. I am happy to announce they have come to their senses.

This represents a significant shift and CJ is bragging that they had a lot to do with this policy change. What role CJ has played is not clear, but they announce it as follows:

After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers. 

This YSM policy change is the result of a strong relationship between Commission Junction and YSM. We have spent more than six months working with YSM to enact the new editorial policy and are very pleased that this effort has resulted in changes that are sure to create opportunities for our publishers and advertisers.

CJ will no doubt win big points for helping to make this happen. There are many affiliates who spend precious time building out landing pages or redirect systems to get around the old policy. This will certainly affect the way many PPC affiliates do business.

I never understood their old policy and how Yahoo could justify leaving so much money on the table. Only in a huge corporation could fear of legal actions, cause such an irrational policy.

Yahoo is now poised to woo Google-weary affiliates after numerous “quality guidelines” slaps against affiliates in the Adwords format. Many recent studies have shown the Google slaps have been a boon for small PPC marketing platforms, which have absorbed many affiliates looking to recoup lost traffic. Yahoo can now attract these advertisers with a more permissive policy than Google. Hopefully this will give them a competitive advantage, and show Google that they “slap” affiliates at their peril.

The other major difference between AdSpyPro and UnderCoverProfits is that Ad Spy Pro doesn’t have a subscription fee or limits on the number of keywords you can monitor.

They can do this because they are releasing the software package for installation on the end user’s server. They will install it for you for $30 extra. This means you have to pay the server costs, but you will not have to pay $300 a month like those who are currently subscribed to UnderCoverProfits.

To tell you the truth I am one of those people who have been using UnderCoverProfits, but I just made a purchase of Ad Spy Pro. I am looking forward to saving that $300 a month in fees from Under Cover Profits.

I am not sure if it will have all the features of UnderCoverProfits, but at that price it doesn’t have to. If you want to check it out here is the link: http://adspypro.income-booster.info/

Ebay pays high volume publishers a much better percentage of sales than they pay to lower level publishers. Shoemoney estimates they are generating about 400,000 clicks per day through their new AuctionAds platform. That is an incredible amount of volume.

If you sign up as an eBay affiliate on your own here is the commission structure you will be faced with:

Revenue Share Compensation

eBay Revenue Compensation
$0 – $99.99 50%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 55%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 60%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 65%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 70%
$3,000,000.00 + 75%

Active Registered User (ACRU)

ACRUs Compensation
1 – 49 $25.00
50 – 1,999 $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 $31.00
30,000 + $35.00

This in itself makes it clear why Auction Ads is such a good idea. By pooling many affiliates traffic together AA (AuctionAds) are able to maintain the top tier commission payout of 75%. That is 25% better than what someone starting out on their own would earn. This is one of the reasons why AA has over 17,000 users at just 90 days running.

Ad Widgets

To make things simple for publishers who are used to running Adsense ads, AA has provided ad blocks that are formatted in all the same sizes as adsense advertisements. There is no need to reformat your Adsense site to incorporate AA or a combination of AA and Adsense.

Referral Program

To make the deal even sweeter for publishers, AA has integrated a referral program into their ad units. Most everyone knows that Google’s Adsense has benefitted from free advertising on all of its publisher sites by incorporating a link to a sign up page on each and every Adsense unit. That notorious “Ads by Gooooooogle” is really just a link to get other publishers to sign up. Google has never offered it’s publishers any compensation for this referral program. Yahoo Publisher Network does the exact same thing.

Auction Ads explains how their referral program is different:

With AuctionAds, we don’t want you to worry about the loss of revenue caused by the branding we use to identify the ad units as ads on your site. So we have implemented a referral program that is imbedded right into your ad units. So anytime anyone clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” and signs up for the program, you will earn 2% of those new publisher’s earnings. Pretty sweet deal. This means every single click made from our ad units, even the clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” gives you the potential to earn money.

I will be testing AuctionAds on this blog over the next few weeks to see what my readers think. I am not sure if the products offered will be useful to you all. As in everything, you will all vote with your wallets, and in time I will report to you if AuctionAds are really a money maker or not.

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

Apparently click discounts will start taking place today and they will be automatically credited. No changes by the end user are necessary. We will all begin receiving a discount on clicks. Who can complain about that? How significant that discount will be remains to be seen, but I hope some readers will post their experiences in the comments.

Those who extensively use the content network and Yahoo search affiliates will likely see the lion’s share of the discounts. Yahoo is recognizing that their search affiliates and content network do not provide the same level of quality that the standard search results offer.

Everyone who has done any significant search marketing already knows this, but it is interesting that Yahoo would come right out and admit it. I think it is a good move in the direction of greater transparency. Yahoo is continuing to roll out improvements to their Panama platform. Preliminary results are good, but whether or not they will increase market share remains to be seen.

I find myself thankful that Google is not the only game in town. Competition is good for everyone. Now if MSN could just get their search marketing platform in order, we might see some serious innovation.

As we have discussed on this blog, affiliate marketers have been scrambling to regain their Google paid traffic ever since Google implemented it’s infamous quality score algorithm. There is no fighting it. The quality score algorithm is here to stay. Mike is pointing the way search engine marketing is now headed.

Search Engine Marketing is Dead…at least as we have come to know it in the past. The days of bid power have dwindled, and a time of synergy has emerged. Synergy between account structure, keyword bids, ad copy and landing page quality is now the undeniable recipe for search success.  Never before has a thorough understanding of the mechanism or funnel of search been more important. In fact, not being an expert on the various pieces of search will leave you in a constant state of bewilderment: Why can’t I get to the top of the listings for my best converting terms? Why does the chart mapping my ROI show a continued movement toward higher CPC’s and less profitability?

The answer is easy…its called Quality Score Optimization (QSO), and it’s the only way to professionally approach search engine marketing in 2007.

The problem many smaller search engine marketers face is the amount of testing it takes to optimize a paid search campaign with QSO. Paid search is no longer the easy entry point for those who know nothing about SEO. Search engine marketing is going the way of SEO. SEM’s will have to chase after Google’s newest algorithm, which like their natural one, will likely continue to change.

Search engine marketing is an ever changing landscape. At times we get a glimpse over the horizon and see where we are headed. Mike Jones at Pepperjam Search just had one of those moments and shared it with us all.

We are paying our database developer to create new imports for the new YSM reporting system, because Yahoo completely changed the report formats that are available. I have talked to other affiliate marketers who are facing the same headache, but having a much harder time than I am. I suppose I was a little more prepared, because I saw this coming. I knew the upgrade would be a huge headache and I got my developers on it as soon as I got a preview of the new accounts.

One of the major benefits that I was looking forward to was a streamlined editorial review, where new keywords and ads would go online right away. That was completely misleading. All new ads, adgroups and keywords still have to go through the same old slow editorial review by humans. The only difference is they show up in the adgroup right away with the status of “pending”. What the hell is that! That is not a streamlined editorial review.
I have yet to see how the numbers on the new bidding model will work out. Once I sort out the huge mess that all my accounts have become, I will report back on this.

That brings me to my next point. Why has Yahoo taken categories and made them into campaigns? Yahoo has taken all our existing categories and turned them into campaigns, even though the campaign limit per account is 20. To make up for this they lumped the rest of our categories into one huge campaign called “Merged Campaigns”. So in order to create adgroups to fill these campaigns they split up currently existing categories into smaller ones and named them whatever they thought they were about. Isn’t it obvious that the old Yahoo Search Marketing “category” was the equivalent of an “adgroup” and not a “campaign”? So I have to clean up this disorganized mess. It has made it completely impossible to track my ROI, because what was once tracked as one category now has been split into 4. I have been working on this with a team of 3 other assistants for 7 business days now. I should be working on new projects that we have in the works, but I am stuck fixing something that wasn’t broken. That’s “progress” for you; well that’s “progress” at Yahoo Search Marketing.

I think they should give everyone a week’s worth of free clicks just for putting us through all this. We have been loyal customers and spend thousands of dollars every week. But we have no choice really do we? Yahoo is the big #2 and without them we would be missing out on a really big market. I used to like YSM a lot, let’s hope I can sort it out and make the new system work for us. More details on the Yahoo Search Marketing upgrade to come.

I got an announcement from Yahoo UK, not that they would start charging American clients in dollars, but that they would be lowering the minimum bid for “certain keywords”. Here is what they say: