Today, I was looking through my server statistics for an account at one of the hosting providers I maintain, and I noticed something pretty funny and incredibly timely, considering everything that has been going on in the world as of late.  It seems that I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Yahoo Local from searches for “gas prices in Chicago”.  This brings back some good memories:

It was about three years ago that someone forwarded me a chain email that was a plan to fight high gas prices.  The idea was to boycott Exxon Mobil.  The email claimed that by doing so, it would force the world’s largest oil company to react by lowering their prices, in order to “drive more traffic” to their stations.  The smaller competitors, faced with increased price competition from the giant corporation, would have no choice other than to respond by lowering their own prices.  Although completely unrealistic, the theory actually made some sense.

At the time I read this email, I was part of a small internet startup called LocalLaunch.  We focused almost exclusively on local internet marketing.  At that time, this was a specialization which very few companies had.  So, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to generate internet traffic from geographically qualified searches.

One of the early search properties to launch specifically serving the local small business market was Yahoo Local.  Yahoo Local integrated a directory taxonomy with very basic social networking tools (in the form of user reviews).  The earliest version ranked its results based on a fairly crude algorithm which calculated relevancy, ratings, and distance. 

Herein lies one of the biggest challenges with truly local targeting on the internet.  Every connection to the internet is provided with a unique IP address that can be used to indicate the location of the user, so it very often gets used in the targeting of search advertising results.  When a user searches for “gas stations” with no further geo-qualification, it makes sense that they intended to find a business close to their location.  IP targeting works fairly well when covering a large area, but it becomes significantly less accurate when the target is localized to a specific part of a city, neighborhood, or a radius.  This is because IP addresses are provided by internet service providers (ISPs).  Depending on where you live and what web service you use, your provider might not be hosted locally.  The result is that your IP address may indicate that you are sitting far from where you are actually conducting your searches.

So, IP targeting does not work that well for true local plays, such as Yahoo Local.

Unlike the PPC engines (Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Panama); Yahoo Local does not use IP targeting to calculate the distance portion of it’s ranking algorithm.  Instead, it measures the distance between a business address and the “center of a city”.  The city center is calculated by doing a scattergram of all business addresses within a given city, and measuring where the business density is highest.  In the case of Chicago, that location is slightly West of downtown.  This is also done for zip codes, neighborhoods, etc.

This method of determining distance works pretty well, really.  A user searching Yahoo Local for “gas prices in Chicago” will be given results that are downtown, and a user searching for “gas prices in 60601″ will be given results that are in 60601.  Most of the time.

Yahoo Local has never been as hard to get into as Google Maps.  It is, in fact, quite easy.  Additionally, also unlike Google Maps, address verification has never been much of a priority.  So, when I received the chain email with the silly plan to fight high gas prices, it gave me the idea for a test.

I built www.neoactivism.com to test whether a site with no affiliation to an address could rank in Yahoo Local. 

I used the content of the forwarded email as my content.  I conducted my own estimation of the city center in order to pick an address to submit for my listing.  Guess what?  It worked.  I started ranking #1 in Yahoo Local for “gas prices” in “chicago”.  The experiment was a success!

That was before gas prices topped $4 a gallon, and they became one of the hottest topics in America.  Now, I am getting tons of traffic from my listing.  And, aside from some poorly constructed Adsense and Amazon affiliate links, the site has no revenue generation stream whatsoever. 

So, let’s hope that whoever originally wrote that chain email knew what they were talking about.  If so, perhaps some good could come of this, afterall. 

Yahoo has added an interesting revision to their Terms of Service impacting PPC advertising on Panama (see the section on “Sponsored Search and Content Match”):

“OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.“

My initial opinion is that this move seems radical.  Not only does Yahoo claim the right to choose which optimization tactics will best serve your needs (possibly including adding/removing keywords, creating new ad copy text, and anything else that might be deemed “optimizing your account”), they will implement these changes without your approval.  In fact, the policy states that they will alert you by email if such changes are made, and only supply details of the applied changes upon written request.  If you choose not to keep some or all of their changes, they will make a “reasonable effort” to change them back, but during which time you will be responsible for all charges incurred. 

Wow.  This is a pretty major shift in thinking.  While Yahoo probably thinks that these changes will always be well-received, as I’m sure they will do their best to truly make their program’s performance improve by doing this, systematically applying these changes with no formal consent represents a decrease in control for the advertiser.  As a provider of pay per click account management, I can tell you that saying “Yahoo did it” is not a suitable answer for the question “why did you write this ad copy?” or “why did you choose these keywords?”.

Lastly, I’m stunned by the final sentence in the policy, “It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives”.  If Yahoo makes mistakes (which it is likely to do, not knowing the advertisers true objectives in advertising) and changes accounts to make them “more successful”, it is the advertiser’s duty to correct police them? 

It really sounds like a very, very bad idea.

Did you know that you can control what syndicated content and/or advertising shows up in your Google Gmail account? Neither did I, until just recently.

I just learned about Web Clips, the feature of Gmail that controls what displays in this area.  It can include content-matched PPC ads, feeds from trusted RSS sources, or custom content.  If you want, it can also be setup to show content from RSS/Atom feeds of your choosing.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Log in to your Gmail account
2. Go to ‘Settings’ on the primary navigation
3. Choose ‘Web Clips’
4. Enter the feed URL you’d like to view in the field under ‘Search by topic or URL’
5. Click ‘Search’
6. Once Gmail locates the feed, click ‘Add’ so you can view it in Web Clips

Of course, there is no better feed you could add than the Paperclip Marketing RSS feed.

For anyone following this thread, my fascination with the Spam Primavera Incident has caused me to spend much more time digging into the way Google Gmail really works.  So, instead of just being a total waste of time, I end up learning some new things.  That’s a good thing.

The area of Gmail where I was presented the link for “Spam Primavera” is populated by a content placement function called Web Clips.  This content may include content-matched PPC ads (I knew this), Gmail-specific content such as tips and tricks (I had seen this, too), but also “custom content” (something I didn’t really know about).

Apparently, this custom content is sometimes written at the discretion of the Gmail product teams.  Who, somewhat surprisingly, have a sense of humor.  Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager discussed what happened to cause this on Google’s Gmail blog.

“Turns out that when they came up with the idea for Web Clips, they didn’t think it made sense to show these RSS feeds and ads in the spam folder. After all, these clips should be useful and fun, but spam (of the email variety) is neither of these things. Not knowing what to put here, Keith searched for “spam recipes” and decided to make a feed out of the results. As he said, “it was just one of those late night ideas” — probably a consequence of too many said energy drinks.”

So, it looks like this chapter is now over.  I wasn’t seeing a PPC ad, afterall.  Thankfully, there isn’t a company out there that is truly this bad at running an Adwords account (or, at least not showing up in my Gmail spam folder).  Instead, it was Google having some fun.

Think the people at Hormel (the makers of Spam luncheon meat) are getting a bunch of free traffic from this?  Today, their stock is at a healthy $37 a share.  I guess you could credit this on the recession driving people to eat at home more often and purchase more canned meats, but I like to think all these Gmail users seeing new and inventive ways to cook with Spam is also having a positive affect.

On May 27th, I wrote a post about content targeting of PPC advertising on Google Gmail.  Specifically, it was about an ad I saw for Spam Primavera.  It seemed to me that this ad was demonstrative of a few things going wrong at the same time:

• Content match on Gmail was reading the page navigation (the word ’spam’ only appeared on the folder name) instead of only reading my unique content
• The advertiser was opted into content match, but was not controlling it (using negative keywords or advanced match types to limit what the keyword ’spam’ might match to).  Having the negative keyword ‘email’ might have been a smart move
• The idea that anyone would make a pasta dish with Spam luncheon meat is pretty repulsive, even though I understand it is a useful source of preserved protein in some other parts of the world

A long time ago, I followed a thread by Matt Cutts of Google where he talked about that day’s Googleplex cafeteria option, bacon polenta.  The SEO community responded by trying to trump Matt’s top ranking for the niche phrase.  DarkSeoLabs “Google Washed” him from the SERPs.  It got kind of nasty, but very interesting.  So, just for fun, I got in the game too.  I wrote a post entitled “I just want to rank for Bacon Polenta, too” (note, this was before I launched paperclipmarketing 2.0 and decided to wipe out all my historical archives).  I think in it’s hayday, the post reached the second page of search results.

I was thinking about this today, and out of curiousity did a search for Spam Primavera.  Funny, I should find a few posts where other SEM bloggers talked about seeing this same ad, and what it meant for advertising on Gmail. 

So, since I’ve long given up trying to rank for Bacon Polenta, I’ve decided instead to try ranking for Spam Primavera. 

Maybe not as tasty, certainly not as competitive, but still probably a lot of fun.