NEW AT YAHOO!

Digging Deep into "Panama"

New flash tutorials in our Help Center provide you with the inside scoop on bidding and ranking, ad testing and geo-targeting

Well, our "ship has sailed" for all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers in the U.S. market—all accounts have made the transition to the new "Panama" system, and you should now be enjoying the easier and time-saving connections to your customers using online search.

However, we recognize that for some it was a big change, and perhaps you haven't fully absorbed just how your account and all of your ads within it have been affected. For that reason, we have developed several new flash tutorials that can help get you up to speed on the lingo and strategies of the new system, as well as to direct some of the decisions you may want to make to increase your traffic, sales and profits.

How Bidding and Ranking Works
This tutorial provides you with an understanding of our new ranking model and what determines an ad's rank. Important information such as how to use quality index and how to set your bids is provided, along with some helpful tips.

As you're viewing this tutorial, we want to remind you to keep in mind this important fact about the bidding and forecasting information in your account: It includes bids by advertisers who may be subject to spending limits that may impact the number of times their ads appear. Once an advertiser's spending limit is reached, its bids will no longer be considered in the bid range. The bid range is not instantaneously updated and may not immediately reflect the effect of these changes.

How Ad Testing Works
This brief tutorial explores our new ad testing feature that allows you to test multiple ads to help you identify effective messages. A recent internal survey of some of our advertisers showed that those who were taking advantage of ad testing were 46% more likely to be highly satisfied with Sponsored Search.

By viewing this tutorial, you can learn how to use our ad testing feature, along with its enhancements, to begin taking advantage of all of its benefits and driving more traffic to your site. Using ad testing, you can:

• Optimize the performance of your ads by identifying the message that drives the most clicks and potential customers to your site.
• Save time by automatically displaying the best performing ads.
• Save money, because ads with higher click-through rates may have a higher ad quality, as indicated by the quality index, and this may lead to higher ranked ads at a lower cost.
• Test different messages, promotions and versions of landing page URLs.

How Geo-Targeting Works
Geo-targeting allows 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.

That same internal survey mentioned above found that advertisers using geo-targeting were 38% more likely to be highly satisfied with our Sponsored Search product. Take a look at our brief tutorial, and you can get step-by-step instructions and tips for setting up your geo-targeting filters to more accurately reach the right customers for you.