Just so Adam doesn’t get in a tizzy when trying to log into his Yahoo Account this weekend, here is the email Yahoo sent out about their systems wide upgrade.

Dear Yahoo! Search Marketing Advertiser,

You will be unable to access your Yahoo! Search Marketing account for approximately six hours this coming weekend while we update our systems. The outage will begin at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, March 2, and is scheduled to conclude at 2:00 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, March 3.

Please be aware that during an outage such as this, all advertiser accounts are frozen, and you will not be able to change bids, add or remove keywords, etc. Thus, if you have changes you need to make to your campaigns, please get them in place well before the beginning of the outage. Additionally, if your daily spending limit has been
reached prior to the systems update, your ads may remain offline for the duration of the outage.

Should there be any updates to the timing of this outage, a notice will be posted on the Dashboard page in your account.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve our service.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

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I already despise the Google Quality Score for its lack of transparency as I believe its a way for Google to hike up bid prices. Well, apparently Yahoo thought it was a good idea because starting Feb. 5th paid search ads will be ranked using an “Ad Quality” ranking.

According to the email Yahoo sent: 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.

The email goes on to talk about how the Ad Quality will work

Example of How Ads May be Ranked
The graphic below helps illustrate a scenario that may result from this change:
New Ranking Model

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. Learn More.
* Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads. Learn More.
* Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.

TopRankBlog has a good interview with the Senior Director of Yahoo Search Marketing, regarding the changes involved in the new platform dubbed Panama.

He covers topics such as the differences between Panama and Adwords, new campaign features, and the revamped signup process.

here is a little excerpt:

TRB: What can you do now to run a campaign that you couldn?t before?

Slade: With the new platform, advertisers will have access to many new capabilities for managing their campaigns.

• * Geo-Targeting ? Enables advertisers to display their ads broadly or to narrow their distribution down to specific metropolitan areas, allowing them to better target their customers, customize their ads and control their costs.
• * Ad Testing ? Allows advertisers to easily test multiple versions of their ads to determine the message that works best for their customers. They can also choose to let our systems automatically optimize serving to the ad that performs best on click-through rate.
• * Goal-Based Campaign Optimization ? If an advertiser has business metrics they?re trying to hit, such as a CPA, ROI or ROAS goal, our systems can automatically adjust their ad rotation and bids to help them meet those goals.
• * Campaign Budgeting and Scheduling ? Allows advertisers to create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over their advertising strategy and spending. Advertisers also have the option to place an account and/ or campaign daily spending limit to increase budget control.

read more here

People new to Yahoo Search Marketing have the ability to check out Yahoo’s knew search marketing platform, codenamed Panama. Rueters is reporting that newcomers to YSM will be in the new Panama system as Yahoo is inviting customers to Panama in stages before its official launch in the first quarter of 2007.

Personally, I’m not in any hurry to switch to Panama. Yahoo, like MSN, does not drive enough traffic at the moment to justify the time needed to learn these new systems in the depth required to fully utilize them. And frankly, I like Yahoo’s current bid strategy, although I maybe the only one, but compared to the Google nonsense its a dream!

Reports around the web are that Yahoo Search Marketing has unveiled its new platform codenamed Panama at the SES conference in San Jose. Yahoo hasn’t done any major upgrades since the acquisition of GoTo.com and has been using basically the same auction style bidding strategy since its inception. The higher you bid the higher your position, pretty simple stuff, but with Panama Yahoo plans to implement a more algorithmic style of bidding including factors like quality score and ROI. Sound familar? Well it should, it is a similar setup that Google and MSN use
which allows them to control the price of keywords (although they would never admit it).

One of the benefits of this new platform is the ability to target a variety of different channels. Yahoo isn’t only a search engine. It has a variety of sites and portals from Yahoo Trips to Yahoo Games and advertisers will be able to target each section. Also along the lines of better targeting, Yahoo says geo-targeting will be easier then ever with Panama. This much needed change was expected to be released by Q3 but Yahoo has stated numerous times that it will be available Q4.

Since I was not at SES to gather more info, I will point you to Search Engine Journal, who has a more indepth review complete with a few almost readable screenshots.

The PPC world is full of tools and applications that some people may not know how to take advantage of because they either don’t understand them or don’t really know what they do.

The Yahoo Conversion Counter is one of those tools. I am a big proponent of keyword level tracking in order to help effectively manage a campaign and the Yahoo Conversion Counter can help you do that.

While the Conversion Counter is not the end all be all for stats it is useful for, guess what, counting conversions! This tool has one purpose and it is to tell you which words in your Yahoo Search Marketing account are converting for you. The YCC also helps track a few stats associated with conversions including count, rate and cost-per-conversion.

Its a simple tool that is easy to use. By no means is it a full stats package but it can help Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers monitor keyword conversion performance.

For more on the Yahoo Conversion Counter visit thise links:
Yahoo FAQ and Conversion Counter Home