What's the big deal
Submitted by smile66603 on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 22:47.
Ok, I’m hoping someone can help me figure this out, because it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. I’ve made several calls to my Yahoo rep and sent her numerous emails, but since she probably read the same email I did, she keeps telling me things I already know.
I can’t figure out why everyone is so excited about the fact that Yahoo is saying you could possibly get a minimum bid price of less than .10. I don’t think I’ve ever set my max bid lower than $.50 for any word and most of my bids are between $2.5 and $5, so this probably won’t even affect me. Also, even if you do get a minimum bid price of $.01, you’ll probably be on the 3rd page, because you’ll never be able to get a decent position with a bid price that low. I would think being able to have a bid price of $.01 would only be good if there were about 1 to 8 people bidding on a keyword so you could still be on the first page and have a good position. Pretty much, this will help you with your long tail keywords.
I think Yahoo is using the minimum bid hype to hide the importance of the whole quality thing and how it will affect advertisers. Also, even if I have keywords and ads with high quality scores, so Yahoo is supposed to reward me for my hard work, it seems I will actually be punished, because if all the other advertisers have lower scores and have to raise their bids, then wouldn’t that mean I’ll be paying more too? I know it’s not the only factor, but isn’t the price you pay on Yahoo based on what other advertisers are paying?
I’m anxious to hear what everyone else thinks about the whole minimum bid thing.
Thanks.
James
James, Yahoo is just
James,
Yahoo is just following what Google has already done. They are putting the value of keywords on a sliding scale. Based on their quality index and what Yahoo thinks the keyword is worth they will set minimum bid amounts. This is exactly how Adwords works. If you have been running campaigns with Yahoo you might have noticed some keywords are being marked Pending Inactive, Bid Too Low. In these cases you have to increase your bid. Theoretically you should be able to decrease your bid on highly relevant keywords. The problem is Yahoo is not telling you it's safe to decrease your bid. I am guessing you are going to have to slowing decrease bids on keywords with a good quality index and watch how they do to achieve that.
Cheers,
Jason Woods
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Hey Jason, Thanks for the
Hey Jason,
Thanks for the input. I was thinking about starting to lower some of my bids, but like you mentioned, Yahoo hasn't really said anything about it, so I was a little nervous. I have seen some of my words jump from an average position of 9 to an average position of 5 in less than a week, so it's possible that either a lot of advertisers had their bids raised and decided not to re-activate their words, or maybe Yahoo is rewarding me for a highly relevant keyword and ad.
This can be good and bad. It's a great thing to get cheaper clicks, but when I've spent 2 years bidding 100,000 keywords into the perfect position, it's a little frustrating to have a lot of them jump out of those positions.
Thanks again for the input.
James
Here's the real motivation
Here's the real motivation behind the minimum bids. Yahoo can sugar coat it however they like, but at the end of the day their trying to generate more money per search than they're currently doing. Many have speculated that they earn about 50% less per search than Google. This is a way for them to bridge the gap.