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Yahoo Search Marketing Launches Blocked Domains

October 3rd, 2007 Posted in Yahoo Search Marketing

Without much fanfare, Yahoo finally releases the domain blocking tool for the Yahoo Search Partner Network. Although this will be a welcome addition to the growing amount of tools Yahoo is offering, many see it’s addition as moot. Is anyone really marketing on the Yahoo Search Partner Network? With the new Blocked Domains option, yes. Here’s why…

Blocked Domains as a Preventative Mechanism

In the past, advertisers did not have much control over where their ads were placed within Yahoo’s Partner Network. In recent months, Yahoo has opened the door to new partner sites in an effort to increase traffic. Still officially in Beta, applying to the Yahoo Partner Network for approval is still a very manual process. From a click quality standpoint, Yahoo had better have a mechanism in place for advertisers to weed out the crummy publishers. I expect a late Q4 push for Yahoo in opening the Partner Network up to new advertisers.

Blocked Domains for Quality Control

Click quality won’t increase over night. In addition, without some measure of effort by advertisers to optimize their Partner Network placements, click quality may not increase at all. Think of all the potential expense you can eliminate by optimizing your content placements, and imagine the high-quality placements those savings may achieve on larger Yahoo Partner Network sites, including:

  • Yahoo: in all it’s permutations, i.e. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, etc.
  • MTV: still a huge online draw, but probably not for everyone.
  • eBay: you can’t deny it’s popularity, traffic and reach.
  • USA Today: probably rated amongst the top 10 news sites.

The Last Word

Don’t knock Yahoo for introducing this tool late in the game. They’ll probably win back a few customers that have scaled back their campaigns. Introducing new tools to advertisers in an entirely different marketplace is significant in itself, but combine those tools into something bigger on the horizon and you have a recipe for winning back some of Google’s market share.

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