Last week, I hacked (I repeat, hack!) together a pilot/test website to explore the online acquisition channel for what traditionally has been a retail sold product. Green Dot (my company) sells Prepaid Visa and MasterCard to the underbanked community. The product is commonly called (however a misnomer) a “prepaid credit card” or “secured credit card” . . . The card is mainly targeted at immigrants, teens, and people with bad credit records. (So its not really for you so please dont click on anything! )

(ok you caught me, I’m just trying to redirect some of my rank juice to increase my natural search results for the pilot site. . . )

The point of the post is actually to compare google and yahoo’s search engine advertising efforts. I tested Yahoo and Google’s system a few month back and now again. The Yahoo CTR is definitely better. Furthermore, my conversion rate is also better on Yahoo (new click fraud algo?). . . However Google is still driving 3x the traffic that Yahoo has been able too. . .

Another gripe against Yahoo. It appears to me that Yahoo has gone way too Web2.0/Ajax happy. . . to the point of decreasing the customer experience. At first glance, the advertiser’s interface is really really slick . . .but dammit its just way too slow (like most ajax apps) and not very intuitive. because the huge amount of data flowing between the browser and the server in the background, there is a half second delay on almost every thing I click on. People expect page refreshes to take some time . . . but not ajax elements . . . if you want to be like the desktop, you better BE like the desktop. . .

It also has Ajax pop-ups everywhere . . . even places where it shouldnt (for example, show me my ad copy right on the page, not in a popups). 3 years ago, popups (browser based) almost compeletly disappeared because of pop-up blockers and because people hate them. Now I see them everywhere . . . as if just because its a Ajax popup its suppose to be any less annoying or less disjointed than before . . . please, someone invent a ajax popup blocker . . .

Anyways, just a cautionary tale for UI designers to not to get Ajax happy . . .