Word on the online world is that Sean Suchter, Yahoo’s top search engineer has left Yahoo the day after Jerry Yang stepped down as CEO. Yang was well known for his dedication to Web Search with his strong, perhaps stubborn efforts to grow this sector of Yahoo’s business including the rejection of Microsoft’s bids.

The tipster who gave this information to valleywag.com, states

“Today is the end of Yahoo Search. Sean Suchter just left for Microsoft. Everyone in the office is shocked. I’ve been on the Yahoo Search team for a while and he is the one key executive that it all depends on. If Microsoft has convinced him to leave and join them, they won’t need to buy Yahoo Search. We will just all join Microsoft anyway. I am definitely going to send him my resume.”

Suchter apparently commanded a lot of loyalty and respect from the Yahoo search group. Yahoo has already lost a search executive, Qi Lu, to Microsoft. Will there be more to come? Could Microsoft end up hiring it’s way into Yahoo’s search business?
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Yahoo’s cofounder Jerry Yang will step down as CEO and return to his former role as Chief Yahoo. Yahoo Board of Directors has initiated a search for a replacement. Jerry will transition as soon as they appoint a successor.

Yang, 40, has been the CEO since June 2007 when the Board of Director requested that he take the lead role. He has led Yahoo through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform. However Yahoo has struggled this year with plummeting stock value starting with the rejection of Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Yahoo. Recently the Yahoo Google deal also fell through.
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A quick warning. Google has included Canada as part of the general geo-targeted settings in Google Adwords. Previously only the United States was targeted by default. Though most advanced users may notice this change, it is something easy to miss. New users in Google Adwords may also easily look over this small update or figure it is common practice to target both regions.

Many may respond to my statement above by saying that no one would make such a simple mistake. Believe me, many will. You will be surprised. I can promise you Google will profit quite a bit off of this little change. Even if only 1 out of 1000 people overlook this change, in a pool of 100,000 advertisers, a million advertisers, that is a good chunk of change.

As LeadQual promotes international clients including in Canada, this comes to us as a disconcerting news as it may artificially raise competition in Canada.

Yahoo has always targeted both US and Canada by default.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Many of our prospective clients want to know, do we have any bidding tools or management systems in place? Yes we do! We’ve built internal tools and bidding systems to help us manage our accounts. Though we are always manually looking through accounts and checking on the data, we saw a need to have systems in place to help us flag issues and quickly make massive but calculated account adjustments.

At LeadQual, we pride ourselves in thinking outside of the box. See an example below. This is our greatest latest automated bidding tool. First of it’s kind. We first built tools for our analysts, but got lazy figured we should automated the whole process altogether. It still has a couple bugs to work out, but so far so good.

[We had to haze the picture out a bit, for proprietary reasons].

Happy Halloween

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google is making more tweaks to it’s Quality Score Algorithm. They seemingly will normalize the data dependent on the position in order to be “more precise” in serving up the more relevant ad. Positions have a direct effect on CTR. If lower CTR ads found in the lower positions were placed in a higher position, it is entirely possible the new CTR would be better than the current holder of those high placements.

Straight from the horses mouth that is Google.

“Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.
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