Yahoo! to overhaul search advertising system

Yahoo! will launch a new search marketing system across its network this year in an attempt to beef up its offering to advertisers and head off the threat of a new product from MSN. The move will have big implications for the travel industry and Yahoo! as they look to battle against the continued dominance…

Yahoo! will launch a new search marketing system across its network this year in an attempt to beef up its offering to advertisers and head off the threat of a new product from MSN.


The move will have big implications for the travel industry and Yahoo! as they look to battle against the continued dominance of Google and the arrival of MSN’s Ad Center some time this year.


The overhauled Yahoo! Search Marketing system will be unveiled in the third quarter of 2006 on a country-by-country basis and is expected to allow companies the ability to launch ad campaigns in less than 30 minutes.


Other new features will include sweeping changes to targeting technology through a more accurate keyword understanding system, alongside a radically overhauled interface for advertisers to track the performance of campaigns.


Crucially in the fight against what is expected to be a far more robust system from MSN later in the year will be the ability to target users based on their demographic information and online behaviour.


A timetable for the launch of geo-targeted advertising has yet be announced by Yahoo!.


Yahoo!’s senior vice president of advertising platforms and products, Steve Mitgang, said: ““We’ve designed our new platform to allow advertisers to reach Yahoo!’s audience through search as well as take advantage of advertising opportunities across all of our unique marketplaces, communications and social media assets.


“Yahoo!’s new technologies and features should encourage more participation in search advertising by making it easier for marketers to understand the performance of their campaigns and experiment more frequently with the medium.”


Yahoo! Europe recently overhauled its travel section and is expected to incorporate the Yahoo! Answers tool – where users can pose questions to be answered by others – in the future.