TOP STORY

New and Improved Sponsored Search

A completely redesigned search marketing platform is on its way, full of advanced, easy-to-use features that will help you better connect with Yahoo!'s vast and valuable audience.

It's an exciting time here at Yahoo! Search Marketing. On May 8, we announced to the world that our completely redesigned Sponsored Search platform is just a few short months away from its official launch in the Fall of this year. We also revealed all of the great new features and tools that will be at your disposal. We truly mobilized our entire business to plan, test and deliver these enhancements to you, and we think that you're going to love the results!

Our new, completely redesigned search ad platform will provide you with an easier, more powerful way to connect to Yahoo!'s vast and valuable audience. The new platform represents a major breakthrough for advertisers, because it's:

1. Easier and more effective: Yahoo! consulted hundreds of your fellow advertisers to develop a campaign management work flow that is more intuitive and will provide more effective controls and features than any other competitive product.

2. Action- and insight-oriented: Our new campaign management application will provide you with more visibility and insight into your performance, and more control over how to improve it. This also ultimately provides users with a better online experience.

3. Built for the future: With the launch of this new platform, in the future Yahoo! will be able to build in features that leverage our unique assets to provide you with many more targeting, format and distribution options.

Powerful New Features
In case you missed the May 8 email or the massive press coverage that followed, the new features that will make advertising with Yahoo! better and more effective include:

• Easy-to-Use Control Panel
  Our completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what's working and what's not--at the level of detail you choose--so you can take action and get even better results.

• Fast Ad Activation
  Most new ads will go online within minutes, allowing you to connect with customers quickly, and easily make changes to your ads whenever you need to.

• Ad Testing
  You'll be able to easily test multiple versions of an ad to find the message that works best for your customers and provides the greatest return on your advertising investment. You can then choose to shift impressions to the ad that performs best.

• Geo-Targeting
  The new platform enables you to display your ads broadly or narrow your geographic distribution to better target your customers, customize your ads and control your costs.

• Campaign Budgeting, Forecasting and Scheduling
  You'll be able to create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending. The account interface provides an easy way to review forecasts of your potential clicks based on your bids and budget, and see how many clicks you're leaving to your competitors.

• Visibility
  Wouldn't you like to understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors? After launch, a new Quality Index will be displayed for each ad. You'll also see the bid range that is necessary for premium placement at the top of the search results page.

Get Your Map Out
The geo-targeting feature in particular has attracted a lot of interest from your fellow advertisers this month. Geo-targeting will allow you to target your ads to potential customers located or interested in particular geographic areas within the market selected for your account. It looks at factors such as the user's search query or Internet Protocol (IP) address to determine when to display your ads.

For example, if your business sells real estate within the state of California you would want to select California as a geo-targeted region. Then, your ads will be shown to potential customers located in California, as well as to search users who may be located outside of California but who have entered search terms such as "California Real Estate."*

The Transition Plan
To help ensure a smooth transition for you and other advertisers, we're going to take a phased, measured approach to upgrading our large, global customer base into the new system. While each advertiser's formal transition into the new system will take only a short amount of time, the full transition of all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers will take place over the course of a couple of months, beginning in the Fall of this year.

During each phase of the upgrade, we will provide you with numerous tools, communications, internal and external training options, an online support center and other resources to help you prepare in advance, get familiar with the new system, and use the new tools and features to their fullest. We will be communicating with you many times over the coming weeks and months to introduce you to the new platform functionality, and offer recommendations on how to prepare your account in advance of the transition.

* Please note that geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors.