Yahoo has announced an alteration to their minimum bid structure

January 26, 2007
by Simon Whittick

Latitude have been informed this week by Yahoo Search Marketing that they will be reducing the minimum bid for over 90% of commercial terms from £0.10p to £0.05p. The other 10% which is the “premium” terms that will remain at £0.10p. In conjunction with the UK, YSM will also follow suit in Germany, France and the Netherlands with a reduction from €0.15 to €0.05.

Agencies have been presented with 2 options to create the alterations, YSM is available to aid in de-duping a list created by the agency (against the premium term list) or to create a list for the agency or client to review and approve before de-duping against the existing account and premium terms.

Jon Myers, Search Director comments “ I believe it presents some interesting options within different sectors. I have an expectation of 95% of all Finance terms will fall into the Premium (or ‘Protected List’) due to the higher CPC within this sector. With this in mind I would say Finance will not be affected generally.

I think the main focus has to fall towards the lower unit value sectors of Retail and Travel. They present accounts with the ability to have large volumes of keywords generating clicks. Within these sectors a few ‘pence’ can matter to the success of the keyword and ultimately the campaign ROI in general. It presents an opportunity to review the niche (or Long tail) terms that may have been deactivated at £0.10 but are again viable spend at £0.05. This will present the opportunity for Latitude to expand further the number of terms within these accounts to generate more marketing spend/ROI/traffic from the YSM network.