Panamaniacs

Yahoo has announced some tweaks to the Panama paid search product including campaign tune up tools.

The Yahoo Search Marketing blog reported the changes today.

The blog stated:

Campaign Tune-Up
Kind of like installing a nitro booster, we’ve revved up your account with a new tool called Campaign Tune-up. Campaign Tune-Up can help you optimize your Sponsored Search campaigns if you’re not running Campaign Optimizer. It automatically analyzes a campaign’s performance history, budget and business objectives, such as cost per click or conversions, and offers suggestions for bids, match types and budgets. You can either accept or reject the suggestions, but fine-tuning your bids could help your campaign run a lot better.

From your Campaign Details page, you’ll see a new link, “Tune-up Campaign.” Clicking the link starts the tuning. You can then set the business measurements that matter to you for tuning your campaign and will be walked through the rest of the process.

Sticky Widget
For our next tweak, we updated the system so that more of your preferences are remembered. As a result, viewing your account the way you want is easier and requires fewer clicks. These “sticky” preferences are also remembered each time your log into your account. This tweak affects the column-sorting on your Campaign Summary and Campaign Detail pages and your Ad Group Detail page.

Yahoo Fine Tuning Panama Tools, Launches Campaign Tune Up and More [SearchEngineWatch]

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Tags: YahooFine Tuning

In an effort to stand out (and then beat) Google, Yahoo may soon be rolling out a structured search for particular keywords, which would give a more informative set of results than just links to websites containing relevant information.

While very few details have been released about this possible new search setup, one example given is for the search term “mobile phones.” This could return a set of results that offer drop down menus for manufacturer information, brands, technologies, prices and stores. Based on your selections from the drop down menus, your search query will become further tailored to your specific needs.

It’s more of a custom search that borrows some ideas from many that are striving to achieve semantic search, from Grayboxx to Mahalo and Twine. If you look at the basics of what Yahoo is proposing, it appears to be most similar to Grayboxx and Krillion, where users search for certain terms and get a set of results that can be narrowed down for products. Obviously this search setup is more inclined to work better for e-commerce product searches, from a structured level. And it builds on concepts that Yahoo’s been toying with for some time, including the promotion of Yahoo Store search results being included in a pertinent search, or its recent push for an improved Yahoo Local.

So could this in fact help Yahoo differentiate itself from Google, by bringing more value to end users? The idea is useful, especially for those masses of users that aren’t terribly accustomed to online search. But it probably won’t make much of a dent in Google’s dominant market share. Especially after buckling yesterday during Cyber Monday shopping. Ask.com has also been tweaking its search tools in order to offer a broader set of results, giving you song clips and videos that play directly from your query page, and other results that speak towards a structured semantic search as well.

Can Yahoo Structured Search Beat Google?

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Files published in Portable Document Format aren’t the most plentiful pages on the Web, but they represent a pretty large available audience. Adobe says it has distributed approximately 500 million Acrobat readers globally, which are used to read everything from archived versions of print magazines to regional newsletters to instruction manuals. Now the software giant is eager to determine whether the documents can join in the digital advertising jamboree that’s powered so much other free content.

In a deal with Yahoo, Adobe has begun offering publishers the ability to monetize their PDF files with contextually targeted text ads. While it admits ignorance regarding the size of the market opportunity for such ads or their ideal surroundings, a beta program launched today aims to get some of those answers. IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, and Reed Elsevier are among the first to offer up their subscription and legacy PDF formatted content for free under the test.

“We don’t know which [content types] will dominate,” said Kurt Garbe, Adobe’s entrepreneur in residence, advertising. “We’ve looked at a cross-section during the pre-beta. Certainly the reprint market is a very big potential market.”

Ads will appear in a side bar to the right of PDF content in a manner similar to search ads. Yahoo will sell the placements on a CPC basis and split the revenue with Adobe and the individual publisher. The program is limited to U.S. publishers with English language content, and these will be able to use Yahoo’s ad management system to track impressions and response rates.

Yahoo advertisers will not know when their ads appear next to PDF content, but Josh Jacobs, VP for publisher solutions at Yahoo, said the company will consider allowing advertisers to opt out of the format or to specifically target readers of PDF documents.

“A big goal of the beta program for both of us is to gain more insight into how users are engaging with this,” said Jacobs. “We’ll continue to look at whether there are other types of creative and ad placements that make sense.”

The move further expands Yahoo’s ad network holdings, which were recently bolstered by its acquisition of Blue Lithium.

Advertising in PDF documents is not new, but Adobe’s Garbe observed the practice has historically resembled print more than digital advertising.

“People are advertising today in PDF,” he said. “It’s just that they’re doing it in the static, old-fashioned way of defining a space, creating an ad, selling the ad space.”

As the beta test progresses and — in theory at least — enters general availability, Adobe will do more to promote the service to publishers, including possibly recruiting publishers within the Acrobat software interface. He added Adobe and Yahoo would likely test richer ad formats as well, but he added the pace of experimentation will depend on the willingness of publishers to migrate from subscription to ad-supported models.

Should the market for ads in PDF files prove lucrative, the question remains whether a software provider such as Adobe can maintain its position as a middleman between publishers and advertisers, or whether it will be excluded as the producers of Web browsers largely have been.

ClickZ: Adobe Taps Yahoo to Sell Ads in PDF Documents

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