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Yahoo Adds Network Distribution & Improved Importing To Search Ads

Barry Schwartz on January 14, 2010 at 10:00 am

After about a quarter of Yahoo Search Marketing not announcing any major product updates, Yahoo has announced two new features to the search ad product. The first feature is named Network Distribution and allows advertisers to select if they want to advertiser on Yahoo’s entire network or if they want to advertise just on either the Yahoo Search network or Yahoo Search Partner network. Part of the Network Distribution features includes a way to adjust your bids, either higher or lower, based on the network you are bidding on. The second feature is a new, improved way to import Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns into the system.

Michael McNeeley, a Yahoo Search Marketing Product Manager showed me a demo on how the features work. Let’s start with the network distribution feature.

The network distribution settings can be found in a couple places, such as under campaign settings. When you go to those settings, you will see the “Network Distribution” settings above the targeting settings. When you click on that it breaks out the options by content and search networks, in addition to breaking it out by the entire network versus Yahoo Search or Yahoo Partners only. It will also show you the past 30 days of campaign activity based on those sections, to see how many clicks, impressions and costs were associated to those areas. From that screen you can adjust your bid, plus or minus, a specific percentage for each area.

The import campaigns feature demo showed how Yahoo improved the overall process from when they first launched the tool. There is an added “import campaign” button directly on the dashboard. You can import either Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns and it figures out which type of campaign it is based on the file type. There is added documentation on the right hand side of this import tool. The bottom of this page shows you the import history and statuses of your past or current imports. When you upload a file, it asks you how you would like to manage duplicates and also tells you how they may have truncated titles or handled negative keywords, as well as other changes that were impacted by the import. Overall, this import process appears to look much more robust that the old method, but the true test is when advertisers begin to use this new process.

In addition to these additional features for advertisers, Yahoo added three main features for their sales team. They include:

(1) A tool that can take a paid search listing and make it into a mobile search ad in minutes.
(2) A tool to help the sales team find long tail keywords. It can find hundreds of thousands of keyword expansions and make them into ads quickly.
(3) A tool to automated the process of account restructuring for seasonality, performance tuning and market dynamics.

Overall, these will be welcomed features to the Yahoo Search Marketing platform. My only concern is that I feel the Microsoft deal may have dramatically slowed the development of these features and we should have seen these features several months ago.

Here is a video that goes through some of these new changes:

New Year, New Search Enhancements @ Yahoo! Video

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.