In the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog, Yahoo! Search Marketing Specialist, Sharon Goodsense has posted some highly useful tips and suggestions on the art of writing effective advertisements. These suggestions are targeted at both professional search marketeers and novices too. The following post is an abridged version of Sharon's Smart Start Guide. Advertiser should keep the following points in mind while creating an advertisement, to enhance their chances of increased clicks:

Give your Best for the Text of the Advertisement:

It looks like Yahoo! is all set to drop its Search Marketing Program called 'Ambassador'. According to Search Engine Roundtable, the 'Ambassador' egistration page is not accepting new member sign-ups.

At the sign up page, when a user tries to sign up via any affiliated website, the Ambassador program page shows the following results.

"Yahoo will no longer be accepting new Ambassador applications until further notice."

Yahoo! Seems to be following Google like a kid. Whatever Google comes up with, after some time you see Yahoo! With the same feature, just different names. As reported by the The BrandVerity Blog, Yahoo! is now displaying geographical locations in its search advertisements.

For example a search query conducted from Seattle, Washington for 'lawyers' displayed results with geographical locations at the bottom of the advertisements.

On February 26 2008, Yahoo! Blog had reported that Yahoo! is changing the minimum fixed bids for Sponsored Searches in the keyword market. Yahoo! will calculate a variable minimum bid for some of the keywords that the advertisers will bid on, which at times can bring the minimum bid lower than 10 cents and at times it may be higher as well. However, Content Match minimum bids will stay at 10 cents till further notice. These proposed changes will start from next week and would be rolled out in phases.

Yahoo! recently updated their guidelines for YSM and added certain categories of advertisements as questionable in their guidelines. These guidelines will help Yahoo! avoid such kind of advertisements and give the user a friendlier and safer online experience.
The categories that have been added in the YSM guidelines are:

Yahoo! has announced that soon it will give websites the chance to offer more data about their site, in order to help Yahoo better structure the listing of site in search results. The users will be to able to subscribe to some of these special results, while others will be enabled by default.

Consider the case of an auction, Sotheby’s, eBay, normally there’s a reserve price (or minimum bid) set based on what is believed to be the minimum value of the product. Now, in congruence with the auction model, YSM is changing the way they set the minimum bids required to participate in a Sponsored Search keyword market.

For most of us the word excluded is more a negative word, especially if you are someone who has been excluded from a party. However, the Excluded Words feature is more of a help when you need to block unwanted searches that you believe aren't relevant. And for the record, the excluded keywords are also called negative keywords, but they're still positive. So for increasing your relevance this is what YSM advises:

Won't it be just wonderful that every click that we get on our sites would turns into a customer. Afterall we work hard only to get more customers. Every visitor is a potential customer, so it is important that every click that we get must turn into a customer.

But 'how' that is the question. YSM here has offered ten landing page tips to turn your visitors into customers:

It is quite possible that while reviewing your account for the week's activity, you notice a jump in your clicks. While such an observation may not be a cause for alarm always, there are a couple of first-aid steps that you can take before you call up Yahoo!, advises YSM.

To approach the issue systematically you need to ask yourself 3 important questions:

First: Have you changed anything in your account recently?