Yahoo to Change Look of Search Results

Posted: December 16, 2005

In a move that has been anticipated for quite some time, Yahoo announced yesterday that they will change the look of their paid results (those from Yahoo Search Marketing) beginning mid-January.

A new look is coming to the Yahoo! search results pages that
will translate into more clicks for your listings. On January
18th, Yahoo! will debut a streamlined design that will make
the search results displayed on Yahoo! even easier for
consumers to read. Our research has shown that by improving
the search experience in this way, advertisers can generally
expect to see an increase in clicks, while maintaining their
conversion rates.

How this change impacts your listings:

* Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored
Search listings
* You don’t have to make any changes to your listings; they’ll
be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
* If you’d like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin
your description with one short sentence that includes your
keyword and focuses on your most important information in
the first 70 characters
* Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that
we believe works best for advertisers and search users
* Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace,
will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored
Search listings, though the exact length may vary from
partner to partner

Yahoo! is taking this step to improve the search experience
for its users. By continuously focusing on delivering highly
relevant search results in a user-friendly format, Yahoo!
also gives you the best possible platform for reaching customers
interested in what your business provides.

At present, on a 800×600 screen resolution (still used by a decent percentage of the population) Yahoo results are all paid except for the top organic listing. If Yahoo has a few special offerings for that result, or it has a decidedly local flavor, it’s possible that no organics from Yahoo will show, but instead local.yahoo.com links will be in that single spot.

What will make this difficult for advertisers is making determining exactly how your listings look at the 70 and 190 character limit. It might be best to build a 70 character ad for Yahoo; and then layer on an additional 120 characters for their partners.

The paid results on Yahoo are still based around the original pay per click engine launched in 1997 (full Yahoo Search Marketing Timeline here).

Several marketing studies, search usability studies, user experience studies, etc, has led them down this path. Interestingly enough, these new limits are strikingly similar to Google. One of the major differences between the search experience on Yahoo and Google is additional integrated offerings.

While both Yahoo and Google have properties that include classifieds, images, news, local, etc. Yahoo has many offerings for small businesses such as hosting, offerings for romantics such as personals, offerings for travelers such as Yahoo travel, etc. How Yahoo maintains exposure of it’s own properties while giving searchers a wide selection of options for finding information will be interesting to see.

Hopefully, they’ll finally give in and include Mindset results.

It has yet to be seen how this will affect CTRs (click through rates) of advertisements on Yahoo and how much this will help their profitability versus the user experience.

I’ve been expecting this, and several other major changes from Yahoo, in Q of 06. Stay tuned for more, this won’t be the only significant change Yahoo makes in the next few months. They’re starting to work on their magic formula for success, and not likely to slow down anytime soon.

Related Information:

« Increasing the Effectiveness of AdSense Ads through Section Targeting

Conversion Analysis Needed Among Top Destinations Such as BestBuy »