Sunnyvale, California — Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc., on Wednesday rolled out a pilot program called “More Sponsors,” as part of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company aims to improve search results that meet the needs of those who use its engine — place more PPC links in Yahoo Search Results, David Pann, Yahoo’s vice president of search advertising, said in a statement.
Currently a pilot program, the new feature aims to increase the number of ad impressions achieved by users of Yahoo!’s PPC services. When clicked, these links bring up an entirely new page that consists of nothing but paid search engine marketing results — effectively, an entire page of PPC ads related to the original search query.
The newly introduced program is supported by Yahoo’s Search Assist features (the search engine’s suggestions feature). “For example, the consumer might type in “Hawaii vacation,” and Yahoo! might suggest vacations packages or resorts,” explains Laurie Sullivan on Yahoo’s Search Marketing blog.
The More Sponsors feature will initially appear on Yahoo Search to begin with, but Yahoo will spread it across more of the Yahoo Network where ads appear. The text-based ads could finally include a logo or some sort of image or graphic. “We are looking at ways to test new formats and treatments of search ads to improve the consumer experience,” Pann says. “Once we have the page that supports the More Sponsored ads, we can test different treatments of the ads on the page.”
So far, Yahoo! has been experimenting on the system for a couple of months, displaying the results to about 2-4% of its overall traffic on the search.yahoo.com page.
When the service is fully launched, advertisers will be able to buy PPC ads for the new page through the standard Yahoo! Search Marketing system and each link will cost the same as in normal results. Marketers will bid on keywords. The ads are ranked based on bid and quality. When the consumer clicks on the More Sponsored links, this executes another search.
Once Yahoo and Microsoft integration is done with one another per their big search and advertising deal, which will power the advertising and algorithm platform through Bing, Yahoo will still maintain control of the user experience, as the company has repeatedly pointed out, and that includes how the ads look on the page. /