Search advertising changes should benefit publishers

 

You’re probably hip to some of the hoopla by now. Yahoo! Search Marketing, which helps advertisers pinpoint potential customers and provides the ads that run on your pages, is in the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to a new search marketing system. The initiative is part of an across-the-board Yahoo! effort to improve our offerings for advertisers, partners, publishers and users alike. You may have heard it referred to in the media as “Project Panama.”

 

What’s changing for advertisers
This ongoing effort involves phased releases of new enhancements, features and functionality. On February 5, Yahoo! will launch a new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. Under the current model, bids are ranked exclusively by bid amount. With this change, ads will be ranked in search results by both bid amount and ad quality.

 

The new ranking model  is designed to allow advertisers to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of their ads. An ad’s quality will primarily be determined by its historical performance—its click-through rate relative its position in search results—as well as its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

 

But what about me, the publisher?
We do not anticipate that this change should immediately affect your Yahoo! Publisher Network account—you won’t need to take any action. Over the long haul, however, encouraging advertisers to develop higher quality ads should bring up the value of our network for everyone, and benefit publishers in particular.

 

To learn more about the quality index and the new approach to ad ranking, check out our post on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Also, be sure and check out the Yodel Anecdotal post from our CEO, Terry Semel, about what “Panama” means in the grand scheme of things.

 

—The Team