Yahoo announced that the minimum bid of $0.10 within the search network will no longer be a true minimum bid. Yahoo is changing it so that the minimum bids can be lower or higher than $0.10. This does not impact the content network.

What makes a minimum bid go higher or lower? Two factors:

(1) Value – the number of bidders and their bid amounts in a particular keyword market (2) Quality – the relevance of keywords, or how frequently users click on the ads associated with them relative to competing ads

Tips on how to keep a low minimum bid?

Here are some quick tips for how advertisers can best prepare for the changes:

- Get to know your keywords
– It is important to know which keywords work best for your business
– Group relevant keywords together
– Make the right bids and monitor
– Use the Advanced match type to get broader exposure in search results
- Maximize the quality of your ads
– Quality plays an important role in how you get charged
– Learn how to track your quality
– Utilize ad testing with optimization
– Group relevant keywords together in your ad groups
– Continually monitor for any changes
- Stay updated to the Account Interface
– Become familiar with new tools that can make managing your keywords simpler.

Here are screen shots of the interface changes that apply to this:

- Pop up image one - Pop up image two

Related Topics: Yahoo: Search Ads

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz