by CIO Staff

Yahoo Releases Search Advertising Software

News
May 08, 20062 mins
Consumer Electronics

Yahoo has released the technical specifications for Project Panama, a new contextual advertising tool for Yahoo search results. The software is estimated to increase Yahoo’s paid search revenue by at least 20 percent this year, The New York Times reports.

Yahoo’s new search software improves the contextual relevancy and advertiser control of paid search results. Yahoo claims the new ad service is more stable and scalable than the historic system it has been using since acquiring it from Overture in 2003, according to the Times.

The new search offering allows the company to better compete against Google, which earns about 40 percent more revenue from every search than Yahoo, the Times reports. Yahoo’s announcement comes days after Microsoft announced its new Ad Center software.

Yahoo’s new and sophisticated advertising system determines the order in which advertisements are displayed in search results and provides more information about how a particular ad is rendered.

Unlike Google or Microsoft’s paid search offerings, Yahoo enables advertisers to see how many clicks they will receive each day of their search advertising campaign and make adjustments based on that data, the Times reports. Yahoo’s new software will also show a graph representing how many more clicks the advertiser can expect for each increased bid.

Yahoo Senior Vice President Steve Mitgang, who managed the development of Project Panama, told the Times that this new system takes some of the guesswork out of paid search advertising where it’s often hard to justify why a company should spend even more money on driving clicks to a particular set of keywords.

Mitgang told the Times that search marketers can take the data from Yahoo’s new tool “to their bosses to justify spending more.”

For related news coverage, read Yahoo Implicated in 4th Chinese Writer’s Imprisonment and AT&T, Yahoo Team Up for VoIP Offering.

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Compiled by Judah Phillips