• by March 17, 2004

Yahoo!'s recent introduction of a paid inclusion program garnered plenty of attention, though some of it, including the attention paid by this column, questioned whether Yahoo! offered sufficient disclosure information to consumers with regard to sponsored results.

In "Yahoo! Practice Creates Furor" (March 8), I wrote: "Yahoo! advertisers that participate in the paid inclusion program will have their listings mixed in with other search results. In order to find out whether search listings have been paid for by advertisers, web surfers must click on a special button to access Yahoo!'s explanation." The button says, "What is this?"

Yahoo! and its Overture search team want it known that disclosure is handled according to the guidelines for sponsored search and paid inclusion issued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission two years ago. Yahoo! also cites Jupiter and Internet Advertising Bureau research reports which suggest that consumers only care whether search results are relevant, not how they're generated.

Yahoo!'s Site Match, which is part of the new Content Acquisition Program, has the express goal of delivering increasingly relevant results to the search index. "We go through a lot of editorial guidelines and have a large number of people who sift through the listings to ensure a good user experience," says Jennifer Stephens, Overture's senior director, public relations. She notes that the new program is the merger of three existing paid inclusion programs Yahoo! has via its acquisitions of Inktomi, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb.

Speaking with CarsDirect.com's Chuck Hoover, I learned that the main benefit of Site Match is that Cars now gets to work with Yahoo! directly. "It simplifies things from an advertising perspective having one point of contact instead of three, and from a consumer perspective, I know that [Site Match] has a self-correcting mechanism in it," said Hoover, CarsDirect.com's senior-VP of marketing and business development.

Self-correcting, Hoover says, in the sense that Cars measures the return on investment from Site Match and any other search program. Cars also uses Google's AdSense. "If we aren't getting good traffic on it, meaningful traffic, we'll stop. We manage [Site Match] like any other media buy in the sense that the URLs we submit for the program have to meet a return on investment threshold. If they don't meet it, we don't submit them," Hoover explains.

That makes sense. Return on investment is always the bottom line.