Changes to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Interface

Had an email from the Yahoo! team this week making note of some changes that they'd made to the interface of their campaign management tool. They've removed the "Top 5 Max Bids," "Position" and "Your Cost" columns. While Yahoo! had planned to add two new columns to their interface, they actually ended up adding three. The new options could go a long way toward helping companies come up with new bid management strategies, mostly because they focus on delivering trending data rather than "current" data.

That's good news for anyone that finds themselves in occasional up and down bidding wars. Logging in to find that the top five listings are suddenly paying triple the cost of what the number one listing was just a few days ago can be frustrating to the small business marketer that only has time to check in on campaigns now and then. With the new trending emphasis, short-term spikes won't have as big an impact on the data that marketers see while logging in to check their campaigns.

The new columns are as follows:

Things like the "average historical bid range" could also help companies to get an idea of how bid prices rise around certain holiday shopping seasons. A florist might be able to get an idea of how high prices increase in the weeks leading up to holidays like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and can try to plan for their advertising budget accordingly.

It will be interesting to see how marketers manage to take advantage of this data and what else Yahoo might offer up in the future.