January 18th marks the first day Yahoo Search Marketing chops its contextual ads down from 190 characters to 70, matching Google’s ads in length.
If you haven’t rewritten your contextual ads for Yahoo Search Marketing, now is the time. ClickZ reminded us that the deadline for trimming down those Context Match has arrived.
It looks like copywriters for search marketing firms have emitted a sigh of relief. ClickZ noted how various SEMs applauded a standard approach to text ads, citing comments from icrossing, Avenue A|Razorfish, and Impaqt in the story:
Several SEMs agreed that this kind of standardization is a good thing for the industry, allowing advertisers to manage their keyword buys more easily, to compare results across engines, and to create ads that are more in line with consumer behavior.
Not all of Yahoo’s advertisers have to fall in line with the new character limit, provided their ads appear on certain Yahoo syndication partner sites. For those points of presence, a longer ad may suit purposes better than a shorter one.
Ultimately, smaller ads take up less real estate than longer ones. “The engines are also always looking for more ad space to sell, particularly search ads. I think this benefit far outweighs any benefit that a sub-set of advertisers get from the longer ad specs,” iProspect’s director of paid search programs Ben Perry said in the article.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
