Yahoo Sponsored Search Version 3 (Part 2)

December 28, 2011 By

Let’s recap:

Yahoo! Japan was faced with a situation where the already insufficient Panama Platform was at a point it was going to be scrapped by Yahoo Inc. If Yahoo Inc is going to start using Microsoft’s AdCenter it was obvious to everyone they would not keep updating the Panama Platform that Yahoo! Japan was using. Would Yahoo! Japan go with an untested SEM platform that Microsoft itself wasn’t even using in Japan for Bing? Or would they build their own in the alloted time? Yahoo! Japan is actually capable of creating their own platform. They have built their own mobile platform & content platform called Interest Match, so I don’t want anyone thinking they can’t build it’s a matter of can they build in time?
There are rumors that the talks between Yahoo! Inc & Yahoo Japan didn’t exactly go the way Yahoo Inc expected it. (Again this is a rumor). It was after that that Yahoo! Japan made an unprecedented decision in the Search World. Yahoo! Japan decided to get it’s new platform custom build off of Adwords. Yep Google Adwords technology. That was  announced around early summer 2010 finally the new platform Sponsored Search ver3 started it’s migration on November 8th. We couldn’t make any changes to accounts like 2 weeks before that.
The Migration from Panama Platform
Let me tell you the migration didn’t go perfect for everyone. Many search agencies & top advertisers use third party tools to control their ad bid rules & for reporting purposes. Someone forgot to check certain parameters in the development cycle because after the migration all third party SEM tools couldn’t connect with Yahoo’s new platform. When you are the person who is in charge of setting up the SEM tools for all accounts & all of them can’t connect I guarantee you there’s hours wasted trying to figure out what went wrong.
Initially they actual way to setup third party tools changed. We thought that after this give it a day or two & the data could be backfilled. Some accounts connected, some didn’t. All of the accounts had zero data the next day. All had trouble getting any data via API queries. This basically increased any SEM ad managers workload if your agency or your company utilized third party tools.
Also some of the guidelines changed with the transition. Some people may not have noticed but if you had disapproved ads you noticed. All in all any could say that the migration could have been handled but when you are replacing an entire advertising platform that is pumping million of dollars a day in media spends, could you have done any better? I feel the migration had mishaps but I think Yahoo! Japan and even the third party tool makers were trying to resolve most problems as soon as they could.
In Part 3 we’ll go over the actual system.

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Filed Under: Yahoo Japan Tagged With: , ,

Yahoo Japan Sponsored Search ver 3 Part 1

December 27, 2011 By

Yahoo Sponsored Search Version 3 (Part 1)

Yahoo! Japan has recently migrated to a new platform in November 2011. I’ve decided to wait over a month to use the new system & write a review of it. Truthfully there are not too many nonJapanese in the SEM industry in Japan compared to roles in advertising. This is one of the main reasons why there isn’t a lot of information that a migration even took place.
Background on the migration:
Yahoo Inc (US) and Yahoo! Japan are two separate companies that share the same branding. Yahoo is not number one in the US but Yahoo! Japan is top dog in Japan. Yahoo! Japan and it’s parent company Softbank also has vast investments in plenty of Japan tech companies. Over two years when it was announced that Yahoo Search would get bought by Microsoft & powered by Bing’s ad platform AdCenter.
At that point Yahoo! Japan was utilizing Yahoo Inc’s Panama platform without much bells & whistles. I can list quite a few issues that we had with the old Panama Platfom.
1. The time was set in concrete to US time. That means that your daily spend would actually end at like 5pm Japan time & reset after that. This made no sense to any of us.
2. Reports were very limited. The platform had like 3 useful reports. Keyword reports, daily reports, & Campaign reports. Other than the keyword report there wasn’t an option to get average positions. There wasn’t a Query report.
3. No Dayparting
4. There was an option to block sites but no option to pull data to see the various sites your ads were being served on.
5. Maintenance was done a few times during our work day but in the night in the US.
6. Reporting access didn’t really exist. You gave access to the whole account.
7. Importing had to be done in one format in excel. You’d beat yourself silly doing an upload till you figure this one out.
Although the system was bad Yahoo! Japan does have a top notch sales staff working for them. While Yahoo! Japan needed many changes to have a better system it just seemed like Yahoo Inc didn’t feel the need to make the system more efficient for Japan. Yahoo! Japan leases the technology from Yahoo Inc.
Yahoo! Japan has a steady growth in Japan & it very profitable. Microsoft’s AdCenter was at that point in time not utilized in any Asia Pacific country. This basically means it was untested in any double byte language territory. At that point I believed that they had two options.
Build their own or use Microsoft’s AdCenter. Building their own was something that I believe Yahoo! Japan has already started to do but with the timing I don’t think a sufficent system could be finished in time. The other option was to use AdCenter. I believe most would think that Bing is in Japan so AdCenter is not truly untested in Asia. Well Bing Japan gets it’s ads from Yahoo! Japan. It doesn’t serve ads from AdCenter either.
What happened next?
Find out in our next post…
Filed Under: Yahoo Japan Tagged With: , , ,

Yahoo Japan Sponsored search Platform launch pushed till October

September 9, 2011 By

Yahoo! Japan which has been using the Yahoo! Inc platform Panama will finally migrate to a new system come mid October Yahoo Sponsored Search version 3. The technology backend is a modified version of Google’s own Adwords system but tweaked for Yahoo! Japan’s own requirements. The two company are not merged & will still be competitors in the Japanese market.

Yahoo Japan still dominates the search market but Google is not really far behind. Google Japan has been playing catchup & will carve it’s own niche in future markets especially Youtube, DSP, & Android technology. One problem for Google Japan was that it was often seen in Japan as a non Customer Support company but this year even by visiting the Google office myself I saw they are stepping up adding staff to help smaller companies. This is vital for Japan because Yahoo! Japan has had sales teams coordinating with smaller companies for years. I think this may have been the inspiration for them to launch the みんなのビジネスオンライン service that I discovered by accident.

The New platform will of course have a few changes such as

  • 4 match types instead of 2
  • Account daily spending cap will be eliminated
  • For mobile you may not target each carrier individually.
  • Agencies will have one login for all accounts.
  • Yahoo’s Keyword Suggestion Tool will be updated to include mobile stats

Yahoo! Japan will try to make the migration as simple as possible & will alert customers if there are any issues. Expect not to be able to upload new campaigns, keywords, or copy for about two weeks during the migration.

 

Filed Under: Google Japan, Japan, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan, Youtube Tagged With: , , ,

Google Japan’s みんなのビジネスオンライン Service Screenshots

September 8, 2011 By
MinaBizLogo

The Mina no Biz online story deepens. We recently found actual screenshots of the new Google Japan service!!!

Here’s screenshots from Google’s new service. This was the only page I was able to access.
The site will be at www.minbiz.jp which seems to be coming soon but for some reason it was actually fully indexed by Google.

Looks like a good campaign site targeting small business’ in Japan. As someone who runs paid search for clients if Google extends service & support to smaller business in Japan they can increase revenue. Looking forward to the launch.

****** Update Google has pulled the site completely.
I guess they are only human & didn’t realize their own search engine quickly indexed & cached the site because of the sitemap.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:novjNJdADOQJ:www.minbiz.jp/success-story/207269+%22%E3%81%BF%E3%82%93%E3%81%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%83%93%E3%82%B8%E3%83%8D%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AA%E3%83%B3%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%22&cd=4&hl=ja&ct=clnk&gl=jp


Screenshot of Google’s みんなのビジネスオンライン
Filed Under: Google, Google Japan Tagged With: ,

Google Adwords Editor goes IDN Domain friendly

September 7, 2011 By

Google recently updated Adwords editor to version to 9.5.1

One of the greatest change to the appplication is now it allows you to input IDN Domains for the Display URL. If you are unfamiliar with IDN Domains it’s internationalized domain names in native language.

I haven’t tested extensively but I think domains like

海外ホテル.com (international Hotel)
should command a higher CTR which should increase actual conversions to client’s sites.

You still have to comply with Google Adwords policy & the domain & the landing page must match. Some of my clients are testing & using IDN domains based on research I’ve provide for SEO throughout the last 5 years. Now clients will be able to test campaign sites with IDN domains that cater to a specific target. The display URL can be native Japan, Chinese, Russian, Arabic etc but the destination URL must use the punycode version.

Looking forward to seeing good results from this Google, thanx for this.

Filed Under: Google, Google Japan Tagged With:

Google Japan’s Mina No Biz Online – みんなのビジネスオンライン

August 31, 2011 By

Google registered a few new domains last month all of the domains refer to the phrase Mina No Biz Online みんなのビジネスオンライン (Everyone’s Business Online).

Perhaps the service will be similar to the US campaign Get Your Business Online. Google has been ramping up staff lately in their still new office in Roppongi Hills. We have no feedback yet on how the GYBO went in the States or other countries.

Filed Under: Google, Google Japan Tagged With: , , ,

Yahoo Japan’s Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool stops updating stats

July 26, 2011 By
Yahoo's Keyword Tool
Yahoo's Keyword Tool

Who said the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool was dead?

Yahoo’s Japan’s Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has stopped updating stats finally it seems. Now I know quite a few of you are thinking this must be an old post or something that was just reposted from 2007. No it’s currently 2011 & Obama is the president of the USA. There has been actually several Keyword Suggestion Tools since the public & overused Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool vanished around 2007 but it seems no one writes about them.

The old Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool was pretty much a staple for too many marketing tools. If the tools were used for advertising that would have been fine but many of the softwares using the tool wasn’t geared towards paid search. It was used as an SEO tool and also benchmarks for domain stats.

 

In 2007 Yahoo launched the first new Keyword Suggestion Tool as they promised when they shut down the old one. Everyone was happy to hear that, business as usual right? Wrong. The first tool was agency only. Each person who used it had their own individual logins. Also there was never any press release on it. Agencies used it & kept quiet. Why not? This is the tool that finally is not being updated anymore.

 

So I know you’re wonder how do agencies get their data now? Well that tool to us was “So last year”. We already have a new tool by Yahoo! Japan. This tool also is schedule to be updated tremendously in Fall 2011. You want to know more about this tool?

Keep reading InternationalSEM.com from time to time I’ll tell you all about it.

Filed Under: Featured, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: , ,

Yahoo Japan starts to use Google organic search results.

November 21, 2010 By
Yahoo Japan has started showing the same organic results as Google Japan.Integrated into the search results are results from Yahoo Answers, Yahoo video, & Yahoo shopping. The paid listings hasn’t been updated yet. At the Yahoo forum for Search Ad Agencies Yahoo Japan stated they would show us a beta preview before the paid listings is switched.
Filed Under: Google Japan, Yahoo Japan

Yahoo Japan’s New Keyword Advice Tool 2010

October 20, 2010 By

The Overture Keyword Tool was killed off more than 3 years ago. The tool’s data was used by online business owners, internet marketers, domainers, & just about everyone else who needed to know the search volume of their target keywords.  The tool’s data was also integrated into plenty of various business’ tools.

Even though the tool was used by so many, the ratio of Yahoo’s paid clients to users who used the data varied a lot. So Yahoo made a decision to kill the tool with the promise it would come back later. Well about a year later or so it did come back. Yahoo smartened up though. Yahoo realized that Agencies gave them most of their business revenue so they made the new tool available to Ad Agencies that ran Paid search campaigns. I think I’ve had access to the Yahoo Japan tool for more than 2 years now. This new tool was really accurate on impression volumes from the previous month & would give keyword ideas & traffic click estimates.

Going back to 2 months ago I was attending a Yahoo Japan seminar for Agency workers & they informed us about yet another Keyword Advice Tool coming soon. This tool finally debuted this month. Summing it up in one word: BRAVO!! These are the new features that are absolutely amazing & useful

1. Search Volume from previous month
2. PPC Competitor level
3. Estimates/Volume based on Exact Matches or Broad
4. Estimates for only Listed Keywords (Only Google’s Traffic Estimator does this & the numbers are way off)
5. Include related keywords
6. Daypart Data
7. Gender breakdown
8. Location Breakdown
9. Age Breakdown
10.  Day of the week breakdown

This new tool was made domestically by Yahoo Japan & really gives Ad Agency’s a clear advantage in the detail we can now research better keywords for our clients. I’ve told our Yahoo Reps that come to GroupM how much I love the tool already but this is a public Thank You.. You guys did a great job. I would imagine that next the tool will include Mobile data. I can’t see what else I could need after that.

Filed Under: Japan, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: ,

Yahoo Japan Site Explorer back online

August 13, 2010 By

Only after a week Yahoo Japan Site Explorer is back online & out of maintenance mode. This is one of the possible reasons why Yahoo Japan has an argument with Yahoo Inc. (US). Their timing sucks. No other way of saying it. A week long maintenance of an important SEO tool, then it comes out of maintenance right at the beginning of the summer holiday. Hello we’re on vacation now & most people servicing their clients wanted to use the tool before the summer holiday.

Yahoo Japan knows this, we in Tokyo know this, it’s those who control the technology who sometimes don’t understand. During this time I had a chance to look over the US version & see it can accept mobile sitemaps. That’s cool. The Japanese version though is 100 IDN Domain compatible.

Filed Under: Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With:
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