'Net Features : yahoo advertising

Yahoo Drops Minimum Bid

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:10:00 GMT

Yahoo! Search Marketing dropped the minimum bid amount on a "large number" of sponsored keywords.

"Given that certain business categories have been impacted by the current economic conditions, we’ve reviewed minimum bid amounts on a large number of Sponsored Search keywords and reduced the minimum bids on many terms. This review process is a part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our search marketplace."

It is important to note some changes to minimum bids have already taken place. When you log in and review your account, some keyword bids that were once below the minimum bid requirement may now be active if their minimum bids were lowered.

This means those keywords will be automatically reactivated and your ads will be displayed. In this instance it's important to make sure your spending limits allow for additional traffic. Good news for sure, but a little notice would have been nice.

It is important to remember the minimum bid (thanks to Quality Score) is only one factor in the cost advertisers pay per click. Ad quality and term competitiveness are equally important to your listing position.

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Yahoo! on the March With Targeted Adverts

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:39:00 GMT

Yahoo! will soon unveil a set of tools designed to help advertisers better target their online audiences.

The new services will include the ability to target graphical advertisements to users searching for particular terms in Yahoo!'s search engine index and customizing the offers in ads based on which websites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites in previous sessions.

Advertisers can also combine Yahoo!'s standard behavioral ad tools with data drawn from advertiser sites for highly-customized ad "retargeting". In an example shared by Yahoo!, people viewing a specific flight offer on an airline website can later be served an ad offer for the same flight when they return to pages on the Yahoo! network.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text advertisements next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on demographic factors like their age and gender. Advertisers will also be able to modify bids for different audience segments.

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Yahoo Includes Images and Video in Ads

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:09:00 GMT

The New York Times is reporting that Yahoo plans to introduce video and images into paid search ads. Couple that with Comscore indicating that Yahoo! increased its search share while Google slid (albeit slightly), and you may want to start taking Yahoo! seriously once more.

With a real push toward Universal Search on SERPs over the past few years, paid advertising never really caught up and was typically restricted to only text and links. The new Rich Ads in Search offering, which should be announced later today, gives traditional search ads a way to distinguish themselves and ideally improve the click-through rate of ads. It sounds good for advertisers and Yahoo!, which for many years has focused on and specialized in display banner advertisements. The word on the street is that advertisers were experiencing a 25 percent increase in click-through rates, but as with anything, that percentage increase will be dependent on the actual advertiser.

From the New York Times article, “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo!. Early reports (remember, this has not been publicly announced yet) indicate that there will be a monthly charge for the service and that it will be initially limited to larger, more notable brands such as SoBe, Pepsi and Pedigree. If Yahoo! really wants to make a play for some of Google's paid search market share, they would extend the program to more advertisers. Based on Yahoo!'s past actions, that's not something you should assume.

You can search for Pepsi, Pedigree or SoBe to see the rich search ads in action.

Here are a few images to give you an idea: