Reading Between the (Guide)lines

Why we have rules for your search marketing accounts

Here at Yahoo! Search Marketing, we try to bring users and advertisers together by creating relevant, effective search listings. To help us create a high-quality search experience, we have a set of editorial guidelines and best practices. Think of them as the “instruction manual” for your account: The more closely you follow them, the better your account works. Advertisers who follow the guidelines usually see a better return on their investment, and users generally see better results.

The guidelines cover a lot of ground, but these are the three primary we focus on:

Best Practices

Our guidelines around best practices are in place to help advertisers create the most effective ads possible. By choosing relevant keywords and writing clear, objective and descriptive ads, advertisers can increase the appeal of their ads and improve their performance. Other best practices, such as keyword insertion and precise geotargeting, only help to further the appeal of those ads.

Marketplace Integrity

Following these guidelines helps to ensure a “level playing field” for all advertisers, free of abusive action, spam and other negative factors. This contributes to user satisfaction, which ultimately benefits our advertisers.

Yahoo! Brand & Community

Our guidelines also exist to protect the Yahoo! brand, as well as the overall Yahoo! ecosystem. They help us avoid running ads for things we don’t want to associate with, such as dangerous or offensive items. These guidelines also are designed to help ensure that trademark issues are handled correctly.

Our editorial guidelines have proved beneficial to advertisers, users and Yahoo! for a long time, so we encourage you to follow them as closely as possible. As with anything, “reading the instructions” will go a long way toward making sure that what you’re building gets built right—without a lot of extra pieces left over at the end.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of Flickr user z5