The other day I did a search on Yahoo.
I know. All you internet marketers out there probably just chuckled. I had to reset Firefox recently and it restored to the glorious default of using Yahoo. But that’s beside the point.
I was looking for a blog post with a really cool n-gram script in it. It’s the top organic listing, but you would have a very hard time knowing that based on this layout:
Yep, the only demarcation of the ads is a little “Ads related to: blah blah” notice at the top of the listing. No highlighted box to show which ones are ads. No little green tag next to ads. The only thing I can see is perhaps one extra line break between ad #4 and organic listing #1. Hopefully the FTC doesn’t see this post because it’s that egregious.
Takeaway
If you’re on Yahoo Gemini (and yes, you should be) then it’s pretty important to at least be protecting your brand name because if you’re not there and a competitor is they’ll probably get the click. See what I mean:
It also means that your ads should see higher CTR because people definitely won’t identify those top positions as ads. I’m a trained PPC professional and had to do a double and triple take to figure out what was going on.
What do you think? Is this good for us advertisers or not? How does this impact your marketing strategy on Yahoo, if at all? Share with us in the comments!
