A few months ago, in one of our long and exhausting meeting sessions inside the company, I came to a friend with what I have thought to be a great idea. An idea that would help Yahoo! search marketing attract new clients easily and cause more agencies to allocate budgets to Yahoo!. The basic idea was based on 5 assumptions:
- Almost no company runs an account in Yahoo search marketing exclusively.
- Most of the small\medium companies in the market won’t open an account in Yahoo! search marketing because of the low traffic in the engine and the very complicated and non user friendly interface of their ad management system.
- Most of the account managers in SMB’s won’t learn the Yahoo! search marketing system specifically and hence they will not end up managing accounts on Yahoo!.
- The only way to make a reasonable SMB open an account in Yahoo! search marketing – is to make it super easy to move the account and track it.
- For agencies that run multiple accounts it is beneficial to learn the Yahoo system, run multi channel accounts and transfer campaigns from channel to channel.
The idea was to offer Yahoo search marketing team a smart way to run an affiliate program in which they will offer every agency that copies account from Google to Yahoo! search marketing – a small percent of the managed budget as a commission. This commission will encourage agencies to manage their clients’ accounts also in Yahoo!, despite the low traffic volumes and the complicated management system.
The challenge of moving accounts from Google to Yahoo! seemed solvable back then. The Yahoo! search marketing team used to help account manager personally with transferring the accounts using spreadsheet files (.xls) and helped users to adapt to it in accordance with the search marketing rules and guidelines. The problem was the fact that the search marketing team is difficult to reach by phone or by e-mail, this made it much harder to do.
It seems like someone on the Yahoo! search management team recently got this idea, and the rational behind it, so they enabled users to import entire account files from Google AdWords to the Yahoo! search marketing platform in only a few clicks (and from other competing SEM platforms as well).
As I see it, if Yahoo! offers agencies an incentive to import account from Google to Yahoo!, and only a small portion will eventually make the transfer, they will increase the online budget that agencies run on the Yahoo! search marketing significantly.
An appropriate affiliate type program for agencies would be all that is needed to doubling the number of in Yahoo!. The CPC rates on Yahoo!, in most search areas, are still relatively low, so there is a clear benefit of the clients also.
A detailed word document that describes a simple yet cleaver way to manage an affiliate program such as this still lays on the bottom of my hard disk (I don’t see how I can make money from this more complicated than smart program anyway). But I hope that someone there in Yahoo! thought about this one before me and one day they will establish a program of this kind, that will be for a benefit for them, us, the agencies and the ultimately the clients that will enjoy the expansion of their campaigns
When I talked about it with a co-worker from a big company that develops management and monitoring systems for online campaigns – he said that there is a big legal issue with that. This guy is probably right, the terms and conditions of AdWords contain some paragraphs that refer to intellectual property etc. It looks like whenever Google sees that some of their budget transfer out from AdWords to Yahoo! search marketing they will do something to prevent it. But now it seems like the numbers are too small for the Google Empire to even deal with this and activate their army of lawyers.
