On May 2, Yahoo debuted a Marketing Dashboard for small businesses. This interface allows managers of small businesses to localize all of their website promotions and social networking strategies so that it’s easier to access and oversee all from one place. Clearly, Yahoo is hoping to be that place.
The dashboard offers such features as:
• Campaign tracking, with a focus on SEO and SEM
• Search engine optimization reports, showing where your business really stands with sites like Yahoo, Google and more
• Live online feedback aggregated from Facebook, Twitter and other sources
• Technical support 24 hours a day, with free and paid options
• Traffic analytics reports showing how a company’s website is performing
• News from across the World Wide Web that’s regularly updated and specific to the needs of small businesses
Yahoo hopes to provide those in charge of interactive marketing with a clear-cut, easy-to-understand platform by which they can monitor and analyze all of their online advertising in one central location.
Some may say that Yahoo is a little behind the curve with launching new systems for collecting website and social marketing data – most preexisting companies have, hopefully, already established a way to monitor their marketing by now. But hopefully Yahoo can introduce new formulas and improve upon existing platforms after looking at what’s popular or what doesn’t seem to work for other, similar dashboards. By directly facing the competition with more established options, like Google Analytics, they may be forced to step up to the plate with a system that’s truly a viable and rewarding options for those in charge of small business marketing on the Web.
What do you think? Will this help Yahoo stay relevant in a fast-changing field that’s dominated by such social media titans as Google? Or is it just a desperate bid to keep up with the status quo?