Panama released

Yahoo! has been scrutinized (and rightfully so) about their new search advertising platform that has been delayed and delayed, not to mention the difficulty in transitioning old keyword lists to the new platform. Well, today it's all a part of the past because they have officially released the new platform to all of their advertisers.

So what's the big deal? How does this affect the advertisers? How does it affect me as a searcher?

Yahoo! Search Marketing has been behind Google's AdWords as far as its usability, features, and profitablility. With the new platform, Yahoo! is adding in many features and tools that should bring its revenues closer to Google. One of the major additions to the platform is the implementation of Ad ranking. Ads will be placed higher based on a ranking system that factors in click-through-rate (CTR), relevance, and bid amount, instead of solely ranking the ads based on bid amounts. This will reward ads for being more relevant and it will provide searchers with ads that pertain to their query.
Another feature of the new platform is ad testing. This will allow advertisers to run different ad executions for the same keyword, and they will be able to see which ad has a higher CTR and Yahoo! will increase the frequency of the ad with the higher CTR. Therefore, the advertiser can see what copy appeals best to consumers, which will increase their ROI.
Yet another change in the system is the organization of the campaigns and keywords. Previously, keywords could only be organized as a campaign and there were no sub categories. Now, advertisers have the ability to create "Ad Groups" which gives advertisers the ability to create specialized keyword lists under their campaign. This makes tracking the success of certain ad groups easier, as well as making the system more user friendly because of its superior organization. The new organization method is nearly identical to Google's.
In addition to these features, Yahoo! has also added many more graphs, charts, and methods for measuring the success of ads, as well as assessing the ideal spending levels for campaigns.
Overall, the system is far superior to the previous platform, but Yahoo! still has a lot of ground to make up. For more information on Yahoo! Search Marketing, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.