WHAT'S NEWS

Short Descriptions Now Required

When creating or modifying an ad, you must now write a short description of 70 or fewer characters. Long descriptions are optional

One key to your success as an advertiser is for users to have a positive search experience. Over the years, we've found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience, and perform better for advertisers. When users are exposed to higher quality search ads, you may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

As an advertiser, you've had two options for your ad descriptions, one long (up to 190 characters) and one short (70 characters or fewer). As of May 16, 2007, short descriptions are now required when you create or modify your ads, while a long description will be optional. This means that for all new or modified ads, you must provide a short description.

Additionally, beginning in June, ad descriptions longer than 70 characters may automatically be cut off in Yahoo! Sponsored Search results. We will shorten the description at the nearest complete word to 70 characters, followed by an ellipsis ("..."). Long descriptions will continue to be shown on some of our external distribution partner web sites.

Tips
To help minimize potential changes to your campaign performance, consider the following tips:

• Create a short description for all existing ads to guarantee that important information is included when the ad appears in Yahoo! Search results.
• Follow our editorial guidelines to help ensure that your ads go live as soon as possible and provide the highest quality experience to users.
• Use ad testing, simply by creating more than two ads in an ad group, to identify the message that works best to help increase your traffic and performance.
• Use the insert keyword feature to save time and help increase the relevancy and click-through rates of your ads.

For additional information on these changes, please visit our Help Center. We've also posted a lot of helpful info on this change in the YSM Blog, which is updated several times each week with tips, updates and other news.

If you have any questions about this announcement, please contact us using the Support Request Form, which can be found in the upper-right corner of nearly all pages in your account.