It will begin to roll out country by country in the third quarter, Yahoo said. Key among the upgrades will be geographic targeting and open APIs that will enable advertisers to tie the advertising services into their own systems.
While Yahoo, via its acquisition of Overture a few years back, arguably invented the search-based advertising market, recently it has been Google that has been grabbing most of the market share and revenue growth.
The updates to its ad platform, which some search engine watchers say will help Yahoo meet or exceed Google in terms of functionality, will be key in attracting more advertisers and publishers to its network.
The first phase, building the core data platform and technologies, is near completion, the firm said in a statement. The second phase will begin in the third quarter, when Yahoo! makes its new campaign management application and initial features accessible to advertisers.
The company is simplifying the advertising GUI and speeding up the time it takes to launch campaigns. Tools such as click-rate forecasting and campaign testing will be added, as well as a tool for optimizating campaigns around stated targets.
Another key update will be the ability to target ads geographically, using Yahoo’s WhereonEarth technology, which can tell from where the user is located, in order to better understand which Pittsburgh or Paris, or which landmark, they are querying.
A third phase will see Yahoo switch from a simple highest-bidder wins ranking model, to one based more on quality. This is said to include how successful ad links are, the size of the per-click bid, and other relevance variables, designed to optimize clickthrough for Yahoo and the advertiser.
