Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke we are back here with uh, joining us today is David Roth of Yahoo. Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. Quite the title to be at a major search engine. What are all of your duties and responsibilities at Yahoo?

Dave Roth: Well for the most part I am one of the few people who is responsible for looking at search marketing across all the properties at Yahoo. If you think about Yahoo not necessarily as a search engine, but as a big company with lots of web properties, it is important to have somebody, or some people rather, responsible for making sure we are doing what is best for Yahoo. Both in terms of paid search and organic search. In terms of best practices, ROI, and keyword overlap, and all those things that big company's kind of have to worry about.

Brett Tabke: And let's make sure there is no confusion, you are talking about being able to optimize Yahoo's properties, pages, to rank well in search engines, or to position yourself well.

Dave Roth: Yeah, its kind of ironic, uh but search engines have to worry about SEO too. In addition there are of course many properties at Yahoo that don't necessarily have a lot to do with being a search engine, so if you look at the 150 some odd properties we have around Yahoo, there is news and music and video and finance, and a lot of very popular properties that have to worry about search engine optimization just like everybody else, and the real challenge is trying to do some relatively simple things across a large scope of sites, and do them well.

Brett Tabke: You did a panel at PubCon last year with AOL, Google, on what it is like to do search engine marketing inside of a search engine. One of the things we keep coming back to is just the scope and scale of some of these large sites. How many pages are we talking are involved in Yahoo?

Dave Roth: Well, page counts are really hard to get at, uh because in fact because of the dynamic nature of the site I don't think anyone can really tell you how many pages there are at Yahoo. What complicates that even more is the fact that Yahoo is comprised of a series of properties, each of which are very large, but I think there are numbers out there like 3 billion page views a day world wide, um there is certainly, I think hundreds of millions of registered Yahoo users. I don't think I could really estimate how many pages there are exactly, but there are certainly millions of them, and you know when we do paid search, you know we, when you look at Yahoo as a whole, I mean you are talking about millions of keywords as well, so it gets very complex, and I think that the key is really trying to prioritize what you are doing and to not try and get overly sophisticated about what you are doing, but make sure that your efforts are prioritized and that the dollars that you are spending and the effort you are spending gets a lot of results.

Brett Tabke: Now we have seen a lot of successful launches from Google in the last year, probably the biggest would be the push on Panama, um what are we going to see in the next six months to a year, if there is anything that we can talk about?

Dave Roth: Well with Panama I think where we are with Panama is in the middle of a very carefully planned roll out, so you saw where um Panama the platform was rolled out and that is now complete, globally. Now what you are seeing is the roll out of um the bidding model, which is what we call market place design, and that is really in the process of being rolled out globally, so I think that that is really the biggest push right now with the Panama product, is to complete that roll out on schedule, and so everything as far as I understand it is going according to plan on that.

Brett Tabke: We have heard a lot of changes in management lately at Yahoo internally, what is your feel, how's Yahoo doing?

Dave Roth: I think Yahoo is doing very well. I'm in a very fortunate position where um you know my job remains the same even if there are changes around me, so my charter hasn't really wavered since I've come to Yahoo at all. Um you know my job is pretty clear cut. My job is to make a lot of money for Yahoo through search, and so I'm very fortunate in that regardless of whatever changes may happen around me that I can maintain kind of a lazor focus, so I still think that Yahoo does some pretty important things better than anybody else, and I think I'm optimistic about our future.

Brett Tabke: What are some of the bigger trends you have seen in search in the last year, year and a half across the industry as a whole?

Dave Roth: Well I think that there are, there is certainly a continuation of rapid growth in the industry, so even though you see in dollar terms, and proportionately smaller increases year over year, I think that the absolute numbers are really starting to kind of get peoples attention, so you do see a lot of mainstream advertisers and websites out there that you know this 40 percent number has been out there for a while, but I think there is a lot more credibility to it, and I mean by that, that 40 percent of the online budget is going to paid search, and that is a big number. It is a big number for search, it is not necessarily a big number for advertising, but that is really continuing to grow, and I don't sense that there are really going to be too many things that are going to get in the way of that. I think you will continue to see smaller incremental percentage gains, naturally, but the nominal gains don't seem to be slowing down. I think that the trend that I see is that we are getting, you know the levers that you pull with paid search, for example, um you know you can't just bid your way into profit. So what I would expect to see is um sort of a migration of optimization down from the impression to the click, and now through the conversion process, so I would expect companies that are currently focusing on conversion rate, multivariate testing, landing page optimization. I think these companies are going to become a lot more important to people very soon.

Brett Tabke: Well we are about out of time. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us Dave Roth.

Dave Roth: Alright, thank you Brett Tabke.