Yahoo! Search Marketing Review

Posted on February 22, 2008

Yahoo! Search Marketing evolved from GoTo.com and Overture. Yahoo! is in the middle of modifying its PPC offering via the Panama update.

The previous strictly bid-for-position model will be supplanted by a system ranking ads based on how much an advertiser wants to spend.

Advertisers enter a bid and daily ad spend they are willing to pay, and Yahoo! will tell you what position in the sponsored listings is available for that amound of money.

Estimates of the number of impressions, the number of clicks likely to occur and the total cost over 30 days are provided to help you plan.

Advertisers can specify goals they wish to reach with a campaing and Yahoo! Sponsored Search will provide information on how best to accomplish that given the keywords and creative available.

Geotargeting can be applied to campaings, instead of merely inclusing the location in the ad creative for a search match. Campaings can be scheduled by date.

Yahoo! can automatically select the versions of your ad that are most profitable and rotate those more often.

Contextual advertising will, in the future, be based upon your ad and landing page content rather than keywords, which should provide more relevant listings. Ad listings will no longer take days to appear; most will be active within a few hours.

The partnership network includes AltaVista, InfoSpace, CNN, and others. With Content Match, it expands to incude major content sites such as iVillage, The Weather Channel, and National Geographic.

Pros:

ROI calculator tool available both for CPC and CPM and setups.
Insert keyword feature dynamically inserts the keyword the bid is based upon into the ad’s title or description.
Depends on the niche Yahoo! has more users that converts better than MSN

CONS:

Gradual transfer of accounts to new Panama setup could mean uncertain results for campaings through first half of 2007.
Interface can be fairly confusing, control panel is not laid out very intuitively.
Have to prepay for your ads in set amounts and set a recurring pre-payment.
Ads have to be reviewed before they are shown. This can take several days. (Not like adwords which is almost instant)