Yahoo! search marketing gets a major upgrade

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 11 July 2007 05:43

Your IT - Home IT

The new system incorporates a new control panel that "provides a simplified interface with user-tested navigation, allowing advertisers to easily understand their performance and providing them opportunities to modify or enhance campaigns every step of the way."

Yahoo! SM says it has also greatly reduced the time between advertisements being submitted and going live, from around 24 hours to 30 minutes.

It is also planning to change the ranking with which advertisements appear as the result of any particular keyword search In the current system advertisers bidding the highest would see their adverts appearing at the top of the list for any search on one of their keywords. The new system will a scores ads "based on quality, bid and other relevance variables, and will be made visible to advertisers to enable them to gauge and optimise placement when the quality-based ranking model is implemented." This feature will be part of the New Sponsored Search at a later date.


The new platform was launched first in the US in October 2006 and has since been launched in Japan, Europe and Korea. Wax claimed that feedback from customers to date had been overwhelmingly positive. Since the US launch there have been several upgrades: th version being launched in Australia is V1.4.

He said development of the new system had been underway for several years: initially with the gathering of feedback from users and then with coding and development for over a year using :"hundreds and hundreds of engineers". He claimed it to have been "the most complex engineering project that Yahoo has every taken on."

In Australia Yahoo! SM provides search-based advertising on the Yahoo!7, ninemsn, News Interactive, Ansearch and AltaVista web sites. Globally it describes itself as being ' positioned within the Yahoo! Inc brand with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California." Its Asia Pacific HQ is in Sydney and it operates independent of Yahoo! which is represented though the Yahoo!7 JV with the Seven network.