PalatnikFactor.com

In the latest effort to placate restless investors, Yahoo president Sue Decker has laid out plans for building the company's online advertising , including a deal to sell all the display and video ads on Walmart.com.

This seems like a great contextual advertising opportunity for many advertisers who are looking to really increase traffic and get exposure through a site that drives a great deal of traffic.

Walmart.com Traffic:

The Yahoo and Microsoft saga now continues to be a battle, and being watched very closely by Wallstreet and its stock holders and analyst. It is still beyond me and has always shocked me how Yahoo can't just seem to really push forward and get ahead and really compete against its main competitor, Google.

Yahoo has the tools, maybe just not the brains. While I'm sure Yahoo is full of smart people, something there just isn't clicking. Microsoft taking over Yahoo and bring among some big changes for us advertisers and it wasn't too long ago at all (maybe a few weeks or less) that Yahoo agreed to outsource part of its paid search to Google (I believe thats the case.)

A Yahoo and Microsoft merger will bring about two monsters to really compete against Google. Do we, as marketers want that competition? I'm happy with the way paid search is for Yahoo, but there is a lot more to just paid search why Microsoft really wants to go after Yahoo. Either way, negotiations aren't going so smooth and Carl Icahn has stepped in:

Is Microsoft really the answer to Yahoo's problems?

I’m not sure if this is new or not from Google search, but if you type in the name of a movie, the first result will be a search result to show you the movie trailer of the movie you’re searching for and allows you to enter your zip code to show you local show times. The movie trailer in Google all point towards Apple sites which show you the movies site and trailers.

Not the most exciting news in search, but definitely shaping up universal search. On the other side of the spectrum, Yahoo also has this feature but I THINK, it has it in a more effective fashion. More appealing and delivers the content faster to the user, which at the end of the day, that’s what the job of the search engine is, deliver what the searcher is searching for as quick and effective as possible.

Google Movie Search:

Yahoo Movie Search:

As I was looking at Google for this, I saw a great opportunity to monetize these movies that have millions of people searching for information on them (movie times, etc). If you look at Google and type in “Sex and The City,” a movie that has millions of fans and millions of followers, Google only has 5 paid ads in its search. 5 PAID ADS. That means there is room for competition.

If you’re looking for the short term buck and can think of a product to sell that has to do with the Sex and The City brand, you’re looking at a possible great niche. Same thing for movies such as Iron Man, and basically any other movie that breaks through big in the market.

If you’ve been keeping up with certain blogs and news, Yahoo is cutting down on jobs and for the past year or two, because of Google, has been in shaky territory. Here is what bothers me more then anything else, how does the property on the net with the most traffic have such a hard time?

Lets look at some stats:

Fiscal Year Ends: 31-Dec
Most Recent Quarter (mrq): 30-Sep-07

Profitability
Profit Margin (ttm): 10.57%
Operating Margin (ttm): 12.30%

Management Effectiveness
Return on Assets (ttm): 4.68%
Return on Equity (ttm): 8.33%

Income Statement
Revenue (ttm): 6.84B
Revenue Per Share (ttm): 5.083
Qtrly Revenue Growth (yoy): 11.80%
Gross Profit (ttm): 3.75B
EBITDA (ttm): 1.46B
Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): 722.95M
Diluted EPS (ttm): 0.51
Qtrly Earnings Growth (yoy): -4.60%

The numbers it shows are all pretty positive but it has this weight on its shoulders and pressure to compete against Google. If Yahoo has an advertisement on TV (lets say during the superbowl) giving small businesses stats on their search and explaining what paid search is, sales would skyrocket. Same thing goes for Google but I guess they depend on advertisers or marketers like us to put out the word.

Is Yahoo too big for their own good?

Panama has yet encountered another change in its platform to make it easier and more efficient for marketers to create multiple ads. If you asked me 3 days ago what I would change to make it more efficient, it would be the ad writing portion of the platform which took SO LONG to create a second and third ad.

YSM BLOG explains a bit on this new upgraded tool for advertisers. “Thankfully, technology continues to take the drudgery out of writing, even out of writing ads for your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. You can now create, edit, copy, delete and view all saved ads (up to 20) for an ad group in one place. More importantly, you can view the performance of your ads against one another with one click.

Still getting writer’s block? A recently released feature lets you view examples of ads by other advertisers using selected keywords, which we’ve enhanced for better usability. There’s also a handy best practices cheat sheet, right in the interface.

You’ll also notice that once you create a new ad you’ll be prompted to create another one. Creating a second (or third or forth) ad activates ad testing, which lets you compare how ads in a specific ad group are performing against one another in order to help you improve your quality index score.”