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Terry Semel said that the company will launch its new pricing and search-ranking system earlier than expected. The new pricing and ranking system will be launched on Feb. 5. Essentially, the new ranking system will incorporate relevance of advertisements. This is similar to the way Google ranks sponsored advertisements.
This is what everyone has been waiting for, the curtains are raising on a new game for YSM advertisers. This is the main event, what Yahoo has been promising for awhile now.
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 in search results 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 graphical form by the quality index.
Other Important Things to Know
* We recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to this amount.
* Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.
* Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.
Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile , Research) is seeing a rapid transition by customers to its highly anticipated Web search advertising system meant to compete with rival Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile , Research), its chief executive said on Tuesday.Chairman and CEO Terry Semel said the Internet media giant is prepared to begin the commercial introduction of the new advertising system on February 5, or about a month earlier than many Wall Street analysts had anticipated.
Yahoo says ad system on track for early release [today.reuters.co.uk]
* Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.
that's what I like to hear!
On a different note, I've noticed that keyword search on Yahoo has been yielding different sponsored ad results using different browsers (IE versus Firefox). Result on IE seems to be determined solely by bid prices, but not so on Firefox. Could it be that Yahoo has already been testing their ad quality ranking on Firefox browsers?
Personally I see Amazon and Google outrunning the lot.
My current situation is well documented both with our attorney (I hate that route) and snippets mentioned here at WebmasterWorld
To Yahoo's credit, the new platform is superior. I'm seeing better conversion rates and it's much, much easier to use.
[edited by: seoDre at 5:54 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2007]
Browser-based ad algo testing? That would be unusual...
If this isn't browser-based ad ranking, an unlikely possibility is that my IE and Firefox have consistently been getting search results from two different data centers.
Interesting though, this morning when I checked, Firfox's ad ranks seem to match actual bid prices. IE used to be the one reflecting bid prices.
