Customer Solutions closed on New Year’s Day

Just a reminder, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Customer Solutions department will be closed on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, 2007. We encourage you to manage your account online that day, or submit a support request and we’ll respond as quickly as possible after we reopen on January 2.

Happy New Year!

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Phone support closed Christmas and New Year’s Days

It’s time to celebrate. So in observance of the upcoming holidays, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s customer support department will be closed on Monday, Dec. 25 and Monday, Jan. 1.

Please enjoy yourselves and stay safe.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Phone support closed Thursday and Friday

Everybody needs something to be thankful for. You know: life, liberty and the pursuit of higher PPC. A day or two off with the family once in awhile is something to be thankful for, too. 

With that in mind, our Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday and Friday, November 23 and 24. We will be open on Saturday from 7:00 .a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for phone support, and again on Monday the 27th at our usual business hours. If you have any issues during our downtime, feel free to send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Cheers, and enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Teaming up to make search submission easier
 

As a publisher, you know how important it is to get your site crawled by search engines—more crawling equals more visitors which could equal more qualified clicks on your ads. Would you like it if, say, it would be a lot easier for you to provide search engines—and not just ours, mind you—with your content and metadata? Would you like it if there were a single, uniform format for search submissions to search providers? It’s kind of rhetorical question. Many of you have, in fact, told us you want just that.

Which is why Yahoo! Search, along with our friends at Google and Microsoft, is pleased to announce support of Sitemaps 0.90, a common protocol that will make it easier for you to get your pages seen across the Web. To facilitate that, we’re announcing, again in collaboration with our friends from across the aisle, Sitemaps.org. This new site provides details of the current release of the new Sitemaps 0.90 protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate. With the common protocol, you can use a single format to create a catalog of your URLs and to notify major search providers of changes.

For all the details on how to submit your sitemap under the new standard protocol, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog. As always, we love to hear feedback, so visit our Yahoo! Site Explorer forum.

—The Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Publisher Network teams

Promoting quality on a granular level

Building a high-quality network is a top priority at Yahoo! Publisher Network. We’ve offered a plethora of blog posts to help you, the publisher, understand just what that means (like this one, this one, and this one). Ensuring compliance with terms and conditions, especially with regard to ad implementation and content, is a big part how we maintain that quality

With that in mind, we’re happy to unveil a new feature called Compliance Manager. This feature helps you pinpoint problems with the implementation of your Yahoo! ads, or problems with content on the same page as your Yahoo! ads, so that you can correct them—and keep the ads flowing. 

Here’s how it works: If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days. 

—Eric Edge, Yahoo! Publisher Network Product Manager

The bad news first
You will not be able to access the Publisher account interface this evening, November 16, 2006, from 6:00 p.m. to approximately midnight, Pacific Time. This should not impact your account earnings, nor the serving of ads to your site.

The silver lining…
We’re pulling the Publisher Center down for those few hours because our gearheads are installing some pretty whiz-bang stuff that should help improve the quality of the network. We’ll tell you about it as soon as it’s done. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

Yahoo! Search Marketing launches a blog of its own

Last week we announced Yahoo! Search Marketing’s new search advertising platform. This enhanced platform offers advertisers more features and control, in a more intuitive interface, helping lead to higher quality ads. It’s very cool.

To help advertisers take advantage of these enhancements, we’ve launched the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. It’s the first blog dedicated to the new platform. If you’re a serious publisher, you’ll want to keep up on all the latest from Yahoo! Search Marketing via the blog.

The new Yahoo! Search Marketing blog will:  

• Include contributions from our executives and managers working on all the new products and features, from geo-targeting and analytics to customer service
• Respond to user community feedback
• Feature guest posts from online advertising industry insiders
• Report on industry events
• Offer tips and tricks to help advertisers learn how to optimize their search marketing campaigns and help improve the quality of the ads you see on your site

And that’s just for starters. In case haven’t already had enough of my golden prose, I’ll be penning the occasional post there myself. Be sure to bookmark the URL—http://www.ysmblog.com—or add it to your RSS reader.

To hear more about the new platform, listen to Jen Slegg’s interview with Steve Mitgang, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Vice President and General Manager on WebmasterRadio.fm.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

We’ve put all your publisher services under one click

Yahoo! offers a cornucopia of publisher-related services and content, from domains and hosting services to content badges and APIs for you to mash up in original ways. Now we’ve put them in one place, accessible to you whether you are in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program or not.

At the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page you’ll find all you need to help:

• Drive traffic—Syndication, feed submission, pod- and video-casting, and search marketing tools and products
• Enhance your site—Yahoo! content, including easy-to-implement search tools, badges, APIs and Creative Commons open content
• Build a new site or re-establish an existing one—Domain registration, custom email, web hosting and design, and online merchant solutions

In addition, the new home page includes headline feeds directly from the blog, and a sleek new look.

It’s all on the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page. Check it out »

—The Team

Publisher Account Interface to experience scheduled maintenance Friday, Oct. 20, from 8:00 p.m. to approximately 12:00 a.m., Pacific Time

On Friday night, from 8 p.m until about 12:00 a.m., Pacific Time, we’ll be doing a little scheduled maintenance on the secure account interface.  For the duration of this maintenance your account will be unavailable.
 

This will not impact your account earnings nor the serving of ads to your site.
 

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

New platform ushers in search advertising enhancements

If you’re in business you’ve probably heard the famous truism, “I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half,” uttered by John Wanamaker, who opened the first department store in Philadelphia in 1870.

You may also have heard that Yahoo! Search Marketing went live with a major new initiative designed, in part, to help tackle Wanamaker’s problem.

It’s a completely new, completely redesigned ad platform that provides businesses with an easier way to connect to customers, and will provide more tools and capabilities to advertisers, along with an enhanced, more relevant experience to users.

So what’s in it for me, the publisher?
If you are a publisher not currently using Yahoo! Search Marketing products, such as Sponsored Search, this release will only affect your business in small ways. The changes you should notice in your ads are those we have noted previously and include:

• The removal of ellipses (…) 
• Fewer truncated words
• The inclusion of 40-character titles on certain ad units
• A change in the number of ads displayed on certain ad layouts

These changes are now live across the network. Other than that your experience should not change—at least not in the short term. Over the long term, however, this initiative, which touches systems all across Yahoo!, should improve the relevancy of your ads.

Double duty
If you are a publisher who also uses Yahoo! Search Marketing, here’s a run-down of some of the enhancements that you’ll be able to take advantage of once you have been upgraded to the new system:

• An intuitive new control panel
  Using this completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what’s working and what’s not.
• Fast ad activation
  Most ads should now go live within minutes.
• Easy ad testing
  You’ll be able to test multiple versions of an ad to find the message that works best.
• Geo-targeting
  Target your customers as broadly or narrowly as you want on a geographic basis, and customize your ads to help control costs.
• Campaign budgeting, forecasting and scheduling
  You’ll be able to create, budget and schedule your individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending.
• See-through visibility
  The new interface can will help you understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors.

For more information on the new search advertising platform visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing home page.

Wanamaker was able to open his department store because technological innovations like steam power and the telegraph provided the means to acquire and ship goods faster and at more affordable prices. The Internet has accelerated this process to lightning speed. We think that the new advertising platform will help take even more friction out of marketing, benefiting advertisers, publishers and consumers alike.

Congrats to the team who worked so hard on the new search advertising platform!

    

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor