Ironvine Search Marketing

There are a couple big changes to both the Yahoo and Microsoft search marketing platforms upcoming in the next 2 months.

Microsoft AdCenter has an expected new release coming out in the next 2 months with new features and updates made from testing and customer feedback. The focus to these should end up being on keyword optimization, video display ads, and support/help. Apparently this will also include a pilot program for Microsoft Content Ads, similar to Google’s Content Network.

Yahoo Sponsored Search is rolling out a new ranking model on February 5th. The new model will take ad quality into consideration as well as the bid value. This comes in line with what Google already does, which follows Yahoo’s current duplication of services theme. This will allow good quality ads to perform at a lower cost, or bad ads to perform at a higher cost. That will depend on the marketer and the ads.

Here’s a quick summary of this important change:

• Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad’s rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.
• This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).
• This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.
• By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

What is “Ad Quality”?
Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. The ad’s expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Overall ad quality is displayed in a graphical form by the quality index.

The “historical performance” should be easy enough to understand, but the “expected performance” will be the mystery value that we can only guess at that Yahoo will be able to monkey around with.

Results of the changes TBD…

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