New Search Improvements for the New Year
Yahoo! rings in 2010 with search advertising enhancements that deliver
Last fall, I answered the question “Does search still matter to Yahoo!” with a definitive YES. But words only go so far, which is why Yahoo! is rolling out new search enhancements for users and advertisers.
All about control
Next week, we’ll update our Sponsored Search product with two new features aimed at giving advertisers more transparency into and control over their accounts. Our Network Distribution feature will let you run your ads on Yahoo! search pages, our partners’ sites, or both. If you run your ads on our entire network, you can also set different bids for Yahoo! or its partners.
We’re also launching a new tool that makes it easier for you to get started with Yahoo! Search Marketing. We know there are many advertisers who use other search marketing providers such as Google Adwords, so we’ve built a feature allowing easy and efficient conversion of your AdWords campaign data into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. You can import your files by simply clicking the “Import Campaigns” button. We believe the ease of launching campaigns with your existing data will encourage more advertisers to use Yahoo! search. You’ll hear more about both of these new features in the coming weeks.
Our sales team has some new tools to help advertisers who work with a Yahoo! account representative, including a web-to-mobile migration tool that makes it easy to move a traditional paid search campaign to our mobile paid search platform. Another tool automatically adds relevant new long-tail keywords to a campaign as our systems show that users are now searching for them. Additionally, we know that advertisers can add thousands of keywords/terms into their account at any given time, so we built a tool that can group them into ad groups by relevance automatically.
More relevant searches
More than 2.5 billion searches are conducted on Yahoo! monthly (comScore, November 2009), and we’re constantly tweaking our search results page to make it easier for users to find things. The more relevant our searches, the more targeted opportunities advertisers will find. Our new search results page makes it easier to sort and filter results, including shortcuts that shows up-to-the minute tweets and news links for breaking headlines.
Since not all Web information is text-based, we’ve also launched better ways to sort multimedia searches. Our video search refiner lets users explore their favorite TV shows, movies and musicians in an intuitive way. The image search refiner lets people explore celebrities and places of interest and easily find more contextual information about them.
Better results for advertisers
Are our search initiatives working? That’s what we’re hearing from our advertisers. Covario, a leader in software and services for paid and organic search management, recently reported that the cost of clicks on Yahoo! decreased for their clients by 20-25%, and as a result their clients increased spending on Yahoo! by 36.5% in the fourth quarter of last year. The Pronto Network, a leading shopping comparison site owned by IAC, increased their ROI by 5-8% after seeing a 10-15% drop in the amount they were paying for clicks, and adjusting their bids to secure the best possible placements of their ads.
Try out these new features or talk to your account manager for more information. I look forward to telling you about more search advances in the coming months—and invite you to take a closer look at us to see if Yahoo! can bring you the same kinds of results.
—David Pann, Yahoo! vice-president and general manager of search marketing