Search Engine Marketing: Yahoo! Releases New Search Marketing Products

On February 10, 2010, Yahoo! released two new search engine marketing products.

The first search engine marketing product announced was the Y!our Ads strategy. This strategy serves ads based on the user’s past search history. Traditional pay-per-click (PPC) ads are served based on the immediate search terms of the user, so this strategy is quite different.

What does this mean for you?

It could decrease relevancy and negatively affect click-through rates for advertisers. Also, a percentage of users that do make the click will be less likely to make a conversion due to the lack of relevancy.

The second search engine marketing product that Yahoo released was the ability to serve ads via Yahoo Search Assist. This means that the words and phrases that appear just below the search box will now be paid advertisement. For example, if the user types in “home remodeling” they would instantly see search suggestions for various remodeling projects or related terms, such as “kitchen remodeling” and “bathroom remodeling.”

What does this mean for you?

Going forward, these suggested phrases will be for sale. Paid advertisers will now have to make bids for the broad keyword at the Yahoo Search Assist level, while also expanding their traditional search campaigns to include bids on long-tail phrases.

Contact KEO Marketing for more information about search engine marketing.