Yahoo: User Data and Smart Ads
Emergence-Media has been hot on the idea of Yahoo’s potential to do Behavioral Targeting and Social Search in a big way for awhile now. Yahoo has a mountain of user information (Y! Jobs, Upcoming, Flickr, Del.iciou.us, Y! Games) that the ability to do customized ad servicing (behavioral targeting) and social search is quite obvious.

The introduction of Yahoo’s SmartAds is a major step for Behavioral Targeting (BT). Behavioral Targeting has been a buzz since 2004 (if not earlier), which makes it interesting that it took this long for Yahoo, who has oodles of user information, has taken its first step in doing BT in a big way.

As per Yahoo’s demo on SmartAds, the system works by matching a user’s behavior to a customized on the fly advertisement. In the demo, it has user Joe (who Yahoo knows lives in Los Angeles and plays Yahoo! Poker Superstars II game), being served “LA to Las Vegas” flight ads (which is a banner ad created on the fly):

Beyond Tim Mayer’s “Cool Lamps” Social Search
Yahoo’s demo with SmartAds gives a glimpse of what Behavioral (with Social Search) can look like. Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s VP of Product Management, is fond of giving the “Cool Lamps” example of Social Search: A user would be receive not only what is traditionally algorithmically ranking for “cool lamps” but also what the user’s friends have tagged as being “cool lamps”.

While that’s the “Social” side of search, what about the behavioral (intent) side of search? The SmartAds example of the gambling enthusiast named Joe can be applied to both SEO and PPC:

PPC: Link Joe’s search for “cheap flights to Vegas” with more accurate geographic information “Joe is from Los Angeles” (than by using IP information), giving greater weight to ads for Casino.

SEO: Like PPC, organic SERPs could give higher relevancy to websites with “Los Angeles” in them due to Joe’s geographic location. Also, more generic searches like “Las Vegas” will lean towards Las Vegas casinos, since Joe is a gambler. On the Social side, maybe webpage URL recommendations based on the behavior of his fellow gambler players online.

Potential Impact
Note that the above is pure speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine Yahoo eventually adopting their SmartAds system to the Search world. In any case, the impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary: SEO is already increasingly more about PR and relevancy and PPC has been moving to a similar model with the use of Google and Yahoo’s Quality Score. Attempting to assess user behavior and their social network is just one more layer of complexity.

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1. Yahoo and Social Media:
   User Profile Building, Social Media CTR rates, Cultural Differences, Yahoo! Answers Opportunities for Marketers
2. On-site Analytics Vendors:
   Future of On-Site Analytics – Integrating Competitive Analytics?

Please Note: If anyone feels they or their company are misrepresented by this post, please feel free to email me or comment on the posting and let me know. I’m always open to constructive feedback and fair evaluations.

Yahoo and Social Media

Speakers:

• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Yumio Saneyoshi, Senior Product Manager, Answers, Yahoo! Inc.
• Ashish Baldua, Senior Engineering Manager, TripPlanner, Yahoo! Inc.
• Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Inc.
• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Joshua Schachter, Director of Engineering, creator of del.icio.us

On Social Search, User Profiles and Advertisement
Responding to a question by yours truly, Tim Mayer answered that they have no current plans for user profiles and stressed the privacy issues associated with that. At least in the mid-term to long-term, Mayer said their goals were to grow the userbase for different social media properties. I was not sure if that included database integretion across the multiple properties as well.
Social Search/Media and Lower CTR Rates?
An attendee asked Tim Mayer if Yahoo finds that social media websites have lower CTR rates, which Tim said he could not answer. The argument that social media websites have lower CTR rates seem to make sense: Social Media websites have great stickiness and promote browsing behavior, behavior that may decrease “bailout” rate to other sites via ads.

Cultural Differences between Flickr, Del.icio.us and the rest
Hearing each speaker, the different Yahoo properties all seemed to come from very different cultures and perspective – most likely result of these properties like del.icio.us and flickr being bought by Yahoo rather developed in-house. Flickr and del.icio.us sounded very much like Internet purist of the dot-com era, focusing on the power of the Internet to change culture with flickr focusing on the “Culture of Sharing”. The Yahoo! Answers and TripPlanner folks seemed more focused on monetization in addition to growing their user base.

Yahoo! Answers on Monetization
The speaker for Yahoo Answers mentioned two experiments on monetization: branded Answer channels and sponsored experts. The idea of sponsored experts answering questions, say on behalf of Black & Decker, should sound very interesting to marketers and PR folks.

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success

Speakers: John Marshall (ClickTracks), Akin Arikan (Unica/NetTracker), Brett Crosby (Google Analytics), Chris Knoch (Omniture), Warren Raisch (WebSideStory) and Barry Parshall (WebTrends)

On the Future of Analytics: Adding Competitive Analytics?
All of the speakers stressed integration with bid management, A/B Testing, and email marketing tools. John Marshall of ClickTracks pointed out that analytics is helping to drive marketing, but there’s no links yet between analytics and CRM/Sales teams.

When I asked the speakres about the integration of on-site analytics (like comScore, HitWise) and competitive analytics, Chris Knoch (?) immediately jumped in and said it was coming soon and that there are partnerships and discussions occurring between on-site analytics tools and competitive analytics reports. Such a move would follow Hitwise quisition of HitDynamics, a search bid-management analytics company.

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Recently, Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch comments on the future of social media as they “search” (bad pun) out for an advertising model. Francisco sees a future in search query data and behavioral marketing:

“We just haven’t seen it work all that well because the companies that know about our search history — aren’t really sharing information with the companies, such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, that increasingly know us personally and increasingly occupy our time.”

Francisco’s commentary is not a revelation, but does give for a pause, especially when she casually brushes of the privacy concerns such data mining would bring:

“[M]arketers will increasingly take someone’s search history or search behavior, and use that information to target ads on social network pages they browse.

It’s not intrusive; in fact, people will come to expect it. And, quite frankly, some may even feel a little bit alive because they’re acknowledged, even if only by a lowly marketer.”

Interestingly Bambi Francisco talks about search engines and social networking sites as seperate companies, ignoring Yahoo’s powerful array of social networking and web 2.0 web sites (Flickr, Y!360, del.icio.us) – which is something we’ve been talking about at the company I work at.

Mining MySpace

While search queries presents great and freely volunteered information on the intent of the searcher, Francisco seems to pay insufficent attention in the inherent value of social network themselves.

Social networks – with all kinds of personal information disclosed freely and even sometimes displayed publicly – is the ideal data rich resource that can help take Behavioral Marketing to the next level. Shawn Gold, VP of MySpace, briefly alludes to this in a recent iBreakfast (via The Virtual Handshake):

87m stories in the database, and a lot of that content is professional. Every nightclub, every major Christian band, every celebrity brand, is in the database. They’re now slicing the database by professional type, e.g., if you want to reach all the comedians.

Sure, targeting comedians on MySpace is nothing compared to the possible social network analysis (SNA) and demographic data analysis possible. But its coming. SNA has been used in counter-terrorism experts and will soon be used to profile users based on their interests and those of their friends, with tools that automatically segment the wealth of user data on places like MySpace. This would invovle building behavioral profiles and purchasing habits of users for targeted marketing and product recommendations engine.
The Power of the Yahoo Network?

While the attention is on Google for privacy concerns and MySpace as the current king of social networking, let’s not forget Yahoo’s network of websites.

A month or so back, folks in my company discussed the power of Yahoo Network (based upon Yahoo’s Gay Pride minisite):

• Upcoming (Events)
• Flickr (Photos)
• Answer (Questions asked by Users)
• TripPlanner/Yahoo! Travel (Travel)
• Yahoo 360 (Social Network)
• MyWeb/Del.icio.us (bookmarking)
• Personals, Jobs, News, Local, etc

Between these network of websites, Yahoo could build a customer profiles allowing marketers to say, “let’s market to single, straight, Asian, Male, (Y! Personal/360) who vactioned in Europe (TripPlanner/Flickr/Y! Travel), went to a PR event in Palo Alto (Upcoming) and has been recently looking at jobs at the likes of Edelman and other PR companies (Y! Jobs)”. And Yahoo, would have all the information available to do this.

Indeed, today we hear the annoucement of Raghu Ramakrishnan joining Yahoo!, who will head Yahoo’s “social search”:

“At Yahoo you have this unique opportunity to integrate conventional search with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Mail,” Ramakrishnan said, listing Yahoo’s services that center on human contributions. “How do you take all this search activity and learn from it?”

The question is: How long before Yahoo can successfully integrate its many web properties? How can they lure MySpace users away? What are the privacy implication of Yahoo having so much information on its figure tips and do they dare build a target ad network based on it?

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