The New and Improved Help Center

“Change” that can help your account performance

There’s been a lot of talk about hope and change as a new president has come to office. Whether you voted for President Obama or not, there’s no question that we’ve witnessed history this week.

Well, we made some changes here, too—to our Yahoo! Search Marketing Help Center. While they may not be etched in history, they do offer the hope that they can improve your advertiser experience. The Help Center is the place to turn first for any questions you have on using your account or its features. Our updates should make this task simpler and faster than ever.

Here’s what’s new:

Better organization and easier navigation
You should now be able to find the information you need in fewer clicks, as we’ve pared down the number of indexes that we previously had. From the front page of the Help Center, you will find four main sections:

• Advertise Online with Yahoo! – This section outlines the account sign-up process for prospective advertisers.
• Managing Your Account – This helps walk existing advertisers through the campaign creation process.
• Fine-Tune Your Account – Advertisers ready to manage their account to a higher level of performance can mine this section for info on optimization features and general strategies for managing to specific business objectives or by industry.
• Learn Online – Our repository for all training materials, tutorials, webinars and webinar summaries, and general education material to help raise your advertiser IQ.

Stronger search functionality
The search results you’ll get when you enter a query in the Help Center are now more relevant and targeted than ever. That’s because we added the ability for the managers of the Help Center to tag content with keywords that we know advertisers will use to search for related content.

Links, links and more links
We’ve made a huge effort to provide links to related information available within the Help Center, but also articles from this blog and content from the in-application help. So, if you want to take a deeper dive into a topic, we’ll be able to provide a diving board.

No need for FAQ-finding…
The Help Center FAQs are now hosted on a single page, which makes it easy for you to read and/or print the ones you need, or print them all out to make your own YSM reference guide.

Take the “inaugural tour” of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Help Center, and feel free to add any suggestions or requests in the comments section below.

— Jeff Hecox