Yahoo Unveils Public Details Of “Panama” Ad System Upgrade
Yahoo’s finally gone public with details about its new “Panama” ad system upgrade, which when launched later this year will bring the system up to matching what Google’s long offered, though both Yahoo and Google will remain behind Microsoft’s third-generation ad platform “adCenter,” launched last week. Details have leaked before, but now Yahoo’s doing the talking directly.
The longer version of this article for Search Engine Watch members goes into more depth about where Yahoo has come from and how this system takes it to a new campaign-oriented system. It also looks at why Yahoo wants to hold off on third-generation features, for the moment, plus a little bit more explanation on some coming features.
You won’t find the new system or features in place today. Instead, all that’s happened today is that Yahoo is giving the many ad management companies and others who programmatically access the Yahoo system through APIs more information on how things will work, so they can start building support.
The system itself won’t start changing until the third quarter of this year, sometime between July and September, Yahoo says. The switch will mean that you’ll be able to build campaigns of multiple ads linked to multiple keywords. But the ranking system won’t change. Those campaigns paying the most money per click will still come up tops first.
There’s no timeline on when rankings themselves will shift to being more Google-like, where ads will show ranked based on a combination of clickthrough rate, the amount being bid and other factors. In fact, similar to Google, Yahoo’s not saying what all the “quality” factors will be or how scores are ultimately determined. However, it does promise that the new system will make it easier to see the “ad quality” score for all your ads and campaigns.
What else is on tap? Better local targeting, for one. Pick a region of the US, and you’ll be able to deliver ads to those either searching from that region or using common terms related to that region. Wildcard targeting, which exists now, will be made easier to use. New conversion tracking tools are to be offered, assuming you want to provide data to Yahoo.
Keep in mind that while I led off saying that Yahoo and Google are “behind” in features compared to Microsoft, that’s not the case with the most important feature — traffic. Ratings services such as comScore and NetRatings still show Google and Yahoo with much more audience than Microsoft. That’s the primarily reason advertisers choose these services — lots of good quality traffic.
Ultimately, as long as there is more demand than search inventory to go around (as is largely the case today), anyone with a major unique ad network is going to be successful. It only becomes a more zero sum game when there is more inventory than demand. That’s when advertisers might become more selective and individual features may matter more.
From: Public Source
