Yahoo has been slowly building up its next-generation paid search platform, and those who have tried it out have been ecstatic over the service.
When Yahoo delivers its revamped algorithms for its contextual advertising business, some search marketers think it will be the cream of the crop. Much excitement has been generated over Yahoo’s work, details of which will be disclosed today.
The company has been testing the new service in Scandinavia under the name “Project Panama.” Some marketers who have participated in the test report good results. The Wall Street Journal quoted Scott Linzer, director of media at search-marketing firm iCrossing Inc., of Scottsdale, AZ, on the service: “It’s a massive improvement over what we had in the past.”
ClickZ reported that Yahoo has to announce details of the new service today. Yahoo will release APIs for the system, to permit those companies that market tools and services connecting to Yahoo to update their products accordingly.
With the new service, marketers will be able to see IP-based maps that can associate neighborhoods to zip codes. That will assist in local search marketing, a growing sector of paid search that is stretching into the billions of dollars.
Ad campaigns can be “paused,” the report said, with no loss of ranking information. That can be done with a single ad or a group of ads. Also, a slider bar on the pricing page will let marketers view their likely number of clicks given a particular keyword bid.
More flexibility in the platform gives marketers the chance to rotate ad campaigns based on which ones perform the best for a given keyword. That is a change from the old system’s limitation on tying a keyword to a single title and a single landing page.
Yahoo and Microsoft both have their eyes on Google’s billions of dollars in online advertising revenue as they both prepare new ad solutions for launch. Ad relevance to search queries and content has been Google’s key to reaping billions from contextual advertisements and paid search ads.
Matching Google means matching its ad relevance, something that has been a challenge to Yahoo and Microsoft as their search engines have not been as well-regarded as Google’s. Although Yahoo may have conceded the search race to Google, its algorithm work for paid search could make them a more serious challenger to Google on that front instead.
—
Tag:
Add to document.write(“Del.icio.us”) | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl
Bookmark Murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
