New Advertisers, Welcome Aboard

The new Sponsored Search platform is now available to all U.S. marketers who open new accounts with us

Step by step, the introduction of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s new account interface and platform continues. This time, the event we’re celebrating is the launch of the upgraded sign up experience for new U.S. advertisers who have not used our product in the past. Beginning today, all new U.S. Sponsored Search sign-ups will use the new flow and immediately begin managing their accounts through the easy-to-use, more powerful platform.

Hey, What about Us?
If you are a current U.S. advertiser who hasn’t yet upgraded, your time is coming. We began the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to the new Sponsored Search in October, and invitations to upgrade will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of this year and early next year. You will receive your individual upgrade date via email at least one week in advance. But if you want it now, you can still request an early upgrade, and we’ll try to accommodate your request.

The Big Five
Ready to sign up? There are five basic steps to getting your campaign up and running with Sponsored Search:

1. Target ads by location
Geo-Targeting allows you to target your ads to potential customers located or interested in particular geographic areas. Example: If your business sells real estate within the state of California and you select California as a geo-targeted region, your ads will be shown to potential customers located in California, as well as to search users that may be located outside of California but enter search terms such as “California Real Estate.”(1)

2. Select keywords for your ad groups
You select the keywords that best describe your products and services.

3. Set pricing and budget
Because you determine the price you are willing to pay for each click, Sponsored Search can offer an affordable way for your business to reach customers. You only pay when your ad is clicked, and your spend should not exceed the amount you budget for each ad group.

4. Write the ad copy for each of your ad groups
Your ads are comprised of titles, descriptions and display URLs that describe your site and what you have to offer. Effective ads are short, factual and objectively written. Remember to include your company name in your descriptions.

5. Review your ad(s) and create your account
After you review your ads and provide us with some basic information to get your account activated, we’ll run them through a standard editorial review, then your ads are distributed across our vast network of sites. A Sponsored Search buy can display your listings on popular sites like Yahoo!, CNN.com, Disney.com, Infospace and many others.

For more information on a new account sign up, please view our Sign-Up Tutorial.

Leave the Driving to Us
Need some help getting started? With the assisted setup sign-up option, Yahoo! Search Marketing specialists will build a campaign that’s customized to your budget and goals. Our specialists will:

Select relevant keywords.
Write effective ads (titles and descriptions).
Determine bid amounts that work best with your budget.

To take advantage of assisted setup, just select “Assisted Setup” on the sign-up page and follow the instructions. You’ll receive a proposed campaign in two to five business days, and a specialist will contact you to discuss it.

With more than 38 million people using search engines daily(2), and 67% of U.S. adults who research online before making a purchase decision using search engines as a research tool(3), it seems clear that search marketing is one of the best-performing Internet marketing tactics.

— Jeff Hecox

Footnotes:
1. Geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed, and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors.
2. “Search Engine Users,” PEW Internet & American Life Project Report, January 2005
3. “How America Searches: Online Shopping,” iCrossing, based on Harris Interactive poll, August 26-30, 2005

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16 Comments Add your own

1. Toivo Lainevool | December 12th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

Hmmm. I’m not sure quite how to take this. As an existing advertiser I would have expected to get the upgrade before new a advertiser would. Where’s the love?
2. Ted | December 14th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

What happened to the inventory.overture.com keyword search tool?
It recently disapeared since yahoo bought overture.
3. Testyah | December 15th, 2006 at 5:38 am

schalom!
4. Administrator | December 19th, 2006 at 11:01 am

Hi Everyone,

We’ve been working on getting your questions answered. Note that some question will be answered via email, as they regard issues invlolving specific accounts. Others we’ll answer in-line. Here goes…

Toivo Lainevool asks:
Hmmm. I’m not sure quite how to take this. As an existing advertiser I would have expected to get the upgrade before new a advertiser would. Where’s the love?

We have been inviting current advertisers to request an early upgrade since October, and you can still do so by visiting http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/newsponsoredsearch/invite/.. We will try and accommodate your request. Invitations to upgrade will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. If you are a current advertiser, we ask that you please do not sign up for a new account, as you will lose all of your historical data, as well as all the work you put into refining your listings in your current account.
5. Administrator | December 21st, 2006 at 4:00 pm

Ted asks:

What happened to the inventory.overture.com keyword search tool? It recently disapeared since yahoo bought overture.

Hi Ted, we removed the Keyword Selector Tool when we introduced the new bid information in the account interface. However, advertisers who upgrade to the new Sponsored Search platform will find more detailed information on the volume of clicks available for any given campaign or ad. Our new system also help advertisers understand how their bidding strategy positions them competitively by displaying their Estimated Share of Available Clicks, an estimate of the clicks they might receive for all of the keywords in their ad group, based on their bids and historical data for their keywords.
6. nezb | January 11th, 2007 at 2:03 am

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7. disgruntled | January 25th, 2007 at 10:01 am

After touting Panama as the future of yahoo advertising, what has really happened is they have built another system that caters to the tiny advertiser and ignored the agencies and large accounts which provide the majority of their revenues. As soon as the upgrade begins on a large account the best strategy is to delete all listings and start completely over, but don’t expect any of the built in tools to help you, and don’t read any of the warnings that pop up-they provide incorrect information. All that Yahoo has managed to do is convince agencies and large advertisers that they are not up to google’s standard and are not worthy of ad revenue from us.
8. jvqh | March 31st, 2007 at 8:04 pm

[@/home/web/it
9. Alan B | June 26th, 2007 at 10:54 am

I am so upset with Yahoo. As an SEO specialist responsible for 150 web sites and overseeing several Yahoo Search accounts, the Overture keyword selector tool and it’s accompanying bid tool were vital to my ability to take a new client’s site, determine the best keywords and best recommended price/position for each one and only THEN set up one or more campaigns.

With the new system, the tools for this are buried deep inside only after setting up an entire campaign which is insanity when dealing with dozens of keywords that ultimately need to be split into multiple campaigns but only after this analysis is done.

Making it worse is the inability to determine the true activity on a keyword. The new four point bar chart is so generalized that it’s useless. If I have two different keyword phrases and one gets hundreds or even thousands more searches than the other, the new system can incorrectly inform me that they are both the same on this four point scale.

For example - using the keyword selector method with real counts, if there are 10,000 searches for the core term, there might be 4,000 searches for a sub-set and 3,000 searches for a different variation - but on the new system they both show up with the same rating when to me, they are very different and to my client it can mean I’ve chosen a less than ideal term, so my client suffers.

I am tired of Yahoo staff saying for months now that “we are always taking feedback from our customers and working to add new features…” Just give me the old features for cryin out loud…
10. ejuaqxenci | August 2nd, 2007 at 3:39 pm

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11. Rob Jordan | November 13th, 2007 at 11:54 am

Just wanted to add my name to the growing list of people who can’t believe Yahoo abandoned the Inventory Overture Keyword Selector Tool. It was one of the most useful tools ever on the internet. Why? Because it gave real, accurate data about search patterns on a monthly basis. Here I was expecting that Yahoo would improve the tool by allowing users to compare the current month’s data vs. previous months. That would have been awesome.

Yahoo, please wake up, pull your heads out, and realize how bad you f’d up by abandoning the Overture Keyword Tool. I don’t want to use Yahoo Sponsored Search’s vague estimates of keyword popularity. They provide no better data than Google’s Adwords popularity bars (at least I can sort those on the page!). I want to see real data. Please bring it back. Please! What will it take to convince you? I’m serious. Please contact me at my email and honestly tell me what will it take for you to bring back support for the Overture Keyword Tool?

Not only can I not believe it was abandoned, I can’t believe Google hasn’t already introduced a version of their own. You know they have the real numbers so they could if they wanted to.
12. Avi Shoub | December 3rd, 2007 at 1:25 am

Let me offer a saving grace for Yahoo! regarding the abandonment of the Keyword Tool.

Coca Cola also did the same foolish thing when they introduced “New Coke” after a lifetime of indoctrinating the planet that Coke is the real thing.

Fortunately, for them, they had a brilliant Marketer who saved the day by suggesting that they market BOTH the “New Coke” and “Classic” Coke.

Is there such an employee at Yahoo? There were enough conditions in the “Classic” Search Tool that made the results useful enough to employ, but “in-accurate” enough to enable Yahoo to offer their advertisers something better. I mean, integrating singular and plural as well as synonyms into the count total calculations and so forth.

But if this argument is too difficult to accept, then the LEAST that Yahoo can do is maintain / develop the “Classic Tool” as a keyword research service - say at a nominal charge (committing of course to keep it functional etc…) along with API access facility too. Otherwise, Trellian might get overly confindent and build a PPC service of their own…..
13. Iacovos | January 7th, 2008 at 11:11 am

Interesting…
14. Kostantinos | January 19th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

Nice
15. Halu | January 19th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

Cool.
16. Stathis | January 20th, 2008 at 5:45 am

Nice…