Re: AltaVista Testing Paid Search Results

From: Robert J. Woodhead (AnimEigo) <trebor_at_animeigo.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:35:17 -0500 (CDT)

First of all, I'd like to thank Jeffrey for his cogent post
about Goto's philosophy. As readers of the list will surely
know, I am a big proponent of Goto.com's value proposition
(quixotic, really, since my evangelism on their behalf has
driven up my bids; Jeffery, you owe me a discount!).

That being said, I think there is a need for discussion
about Goto's shortcomings. In particular, bidding and bid
management are awful -- though the new interface is a huge
improvement, it is still a far cry from what it should be.

There are several areas that cry out for improvement. The
first is that bids for new keywords needs to be integrated
with bid management for current keywords, and bid management
needs to be expanded to let us do things like change the URL
a particular bid will redirect to.

The second thing that needs to be improved is the reporting.
 GoTo currently tells me how much I need to pay to get
position 1, but I rarely want to get position 1. Often, I
just want to get on either page 1, or in one of the top 5
positions. Currently, it's a pain to do that.

More importantly, Goto doesn't tell me a crucial bit of info
- for any keyword, what is the current CTR of a particular
position (ie: position 1 gets 12% clicks, 2 gets 9%, etc).
As I found out when I bid on one of Goto's top keywords,
"Yahoo" (I have a yahoo tips page), sometimes the most
effective strategy is to NOT be one of the top listings, in
particular if the keyword you are bidding on is a peripheral
one. Sometimes it is best to be in a position that requires
the user to drill down to find you, because this generates
more targeted clickthroughs -- the higher listings act as a
filter that remove clickthroughs that you don't really want.
 Dropping my bid on Yahoo to a smaller amount only slightly
reduced the number of clickthroughs I got on it, but seems
to have increased the ROI (though the sample is too small as
yet to be sure). Knowing the CTRs would have enabled me to
make this correction earlier (although to be honest, my
"mistake" only cost me maybe $10 or so!)

Next, it'd be really nice to know the average number of
searches per day on all the keywords.

Finally, Goto does not provide a way to algorithmically
change bids. I spend most of my Goto management time
figuring out the answer to questions like "what do I have to
bid in order to get a position 6 or higher, but without
bidding more than 15 cents". I would like to be able to
tell Goto to change my bids based on maximum bid amounts,
position range, CTR range, or a combination of them, on
multiple search terms, in one operation. This is so easy to
automate that it's a crime that it isn't already done!

Jeffery is right in that transparency (posting the prices
advertisers are paying) is a boon for Goto's visitors. It
is also a good thing for advertisers, and for Goto in the
long run, since more information about bidding will promote
more bidding, and higher fees for Goto. I've been spending a
lot more at Goto since the new interface was installed,
because it's made it easier to optimize my bidding (just not
easy enough!). While I don't get the 20:1 ROI I used to in
the early days, my total return after expenses is up, and
that's the bottom line.

To that end, Goto needs to beseige advertisers with
information that will help them place more (and more
optimal) bids. Every appropriate search term that an
advertiser does not KNOW about is lost income to both Goto
and the advertiser. So why doesn't Goto let me know, for
example:

1) what are all the search terms that the other bidders on
my current search terms are bidding on that I am not?

2) what other search terms similar to the ones I'm bidding
on are available (even a simple word-intersection match
would be fine)?

3) when a listing falls out of some predetermined range (via
an email alert).

PS: One final thing. I've noticed that the referer on goto
clickouts has changed so that it doesn't include the search
term anymore. Beg, Grovel! That bit of information was
very useful in determining the conversion ratio of different
keywords. Please, pretty please, with sugar on it, tack it
back on, or make public the algorithm that
encodes the new URLs so they can be decoded.

--------------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodhead, CEO, CFO, Marketing-VP and Custodian of
SelfPromotion.com http://www.selfpromotion.com/


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Received on Thu Apr 22 1999 - 14:23:15 CDT