As reviews go, this is going to be a really short one. While using the built in Blackberry browser to go to Yahoo, it detected my device, and asked me if I wanted to download this dedicated application. Thinking that I may as well give it a try, I downloaded it, and set it up. Clicking on it, the first screen asks for my user name and password. Easy enough you’d think, right? Wrong. While there’s no problem entering my user name, my password has a couple of special characters in it, as is recommended by most places that require a password i.e. erm… Yahoo!. So, I moved to the password field and hit the Symbol button on the Blackberry… this created a character in the password field rather than opening up the symbol option page as usually happens. Hmm, maybe if I hit the symbol button, then the appropriate key for the symbol that I use in my password, it’ll work?

Nope

So much for that. I have no desire to go and change my password in Yahoo, Trillian, and in the mail setup for my Blackberry, just so I can use this application, so this review has to stop right here, at the first hurdle. Not a good job there Yahoo!

A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

So Yahoo recently updated their PPC quality score, which now includes your conversion metrics.  What this means is that if you have conversion tracking in place, Yahoo will use that to increase your quality score, which effectively means that you’ll be paying less per click than you were before.  Why would Yahoo want to do this?  Well, it’s a smart thing, if they can identify those ads that are converting, then they’re obviously the more relevant ads.  Giving those relevant ads a leg up in the rankings can only help the relevance of their SERPs as a whole.  Also, this is going to push more people to using their conversion tracking, which will give them more of a complete picture of the effectiveness of their system, and what company doesn’t love to get more data on their business?

Barry over at SERoundtable goes the darker route, asking what is to stop Yahoo from, at some point in the future, increasing the price for converting ads.  After all they’re making money for that company, so why shouldn’t Yahoo get a bigger piece of that pie?  I don’t see that happening, because apart from the PR disaster if they tried it, people would just then switch off their conversion tracking on Panama, and just track it through their analytics software.

A while ago I posted about the number of campaigns you could have per account on Yahoo and Google. While I’ve come to accept these figures, I have found a problem with Google that could cause you a problem. AdWords allows you to set a campaign to one of three states - on, paused and deleted. The issue here is that any account that’s not in a state of on doesn’t count towards the 25 campaign max. So if you have 25 campaigns that are on, the system prevents you from adding another one. If you have 24 campaigns that are on and one paused, well the system will allow you to add one more. However, should you decide to restart the paused account… you can’t as it’ll make you exceed your max, so you would then have to move one of the campaigns to another account, thereby losing the history. Since there are 3 states, why not have paused count towards the account count? The idea behind pausing an account rather than deleting it, is that you intend to restart it one day, the way the system is currently set up, you may be prevented from doing that.

Update: I’ve deleted the rest of this post as anon points out in the comments that there is indeed a delete function available from the campaign settings tab in Yahoo - Panama. I just hadn’t noticed it. Thanks anon, whoever you are.

Now you’ve got your business listed correctly in Google Maps, it’s time to turn your attention to Yahoo Local.

Simply go to the home page - local.yahoo.com - and enter in your business information. It it’s there you’ll get a list of results starting with any sponsored listings, then any local listings, then a list of web search results, containing the business name that are ‘near your location’. If the business in the local listing is yours, click on the name for the detailed listing. This gives you hours of operations, any user reviews from insiderpages.com or Yahoo, payment methods, specialties, brands, etc.



If you want you can then edit the listing, changing / adding data as necessary. This data change request is then reviewed by an editor before it’s accepted. You can also claim your listing, providing Yahoo with your contact information, which will then set you up as the trusted contact for this listing, and you can set up some extra features, such as refusing to display your address (useful for a service oriented business), or having Yahoo periodically send you reviews that are written about your business - useful to give you a warm glow, or to let you know when you need to start damage control. Similar to Google Maps, when you add or claim your listing you have the chance to select categories that relate to your business

I’m trying to verify some click charges on one of my accounts, so I tried to log in to Yahoo’s Panama. Here’s what I, along with everyone else in the office, have been seeing for the past 15 minutes.

Fantastic… Hopefully it’ll be up again soon…

Update: as is typical, it was up by the time this post was published…

Since we hit the end of the month we’ve been playing around with the reports in Yahoo’s Panama. A rather nice one that isn’t available in Google is the “Performance by Geographic Location” report. This report allows you to see a breakdown of the spend in your account by location. If you are targeting your campaigns in different geographical locations this is an easy way to pull that data and see exactly where your campaigns are working.