Yahoo! Search Marketing Debuts New Ad Platform at SES

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Yahoo! Search Marketing demonstrated some of the new features of the ad platform that is due to be released sometime in the fourth quarter. I was able to sit in on this “luncheon” session and took a few notes. Here is what I was able to scratch down as they showed us a live demo of the product.

• They are moving over to a ranking system that is very similar to Google AdWords. This will replace the current system of the highest bid being rewarded the highest position. We can only assume that under this new ranking system, high positions will be awarded based not only bid amount but ad performance and possibly landing pages as Google currently does.

• They are moving from “keywords, titles and descriptions” to “targets, creative and call to action”, in other words – ad groups.

• Geo targeting will be available in the new platform. Currently you can only target the entire search audience and contextual. The new system will allow you to select specific countries and languages as well.

• In selecting keywords to trigger ads, they demonstrated a tool that would crawl your targeted landing page and suggest keywords.

• A new bidding tool will display the potential clicks you may receive.

• Ads will allow for A/B split testing.

• New budgeting feature will allow you to set budget not only at campaign level but ad group level as well.

During the migration to the new platform, they informed us that current ads will be unaffected. They also offered everyone in attendance of the demo first dibs if we provided account log ins. So essentially that means we will get to try out new system before general public.

It sounds a lot like Yahoo! Search Marketing has become “Googleized” and why not? So many love the AdWords platform and have been begging Yahoo forever to upgrade their antiquated ad platform. Now it will finally happen.