For starters let me say i found this quite amusing this morning. No, not the minimum bid thing but the glaring headline typo in Yahoo’s search marketing ‘News and Tips’ newsletter they sent me. Oh dear.

Moving swiftly on to the subject of this post, Yahoo! actually introduced the change in the standard minimum bid in the US back in February. So now they’ve introduced it into the UK what does it mean for advertisers?

Well, it would be quite easy to just expect the same campaign adjustments for minimum bids as you do with Google but I would be more inclined to keep a close eye on your accounts during the change period. Why? well Yahoo! state there are two factors that will determine your minimum bid now:

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them).
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

Sound familiar?

If you’re running your search campaign right, the first factor shouldn’t really have any negative impact, moreover it may offer reduced costs. However, the second factor is pretty much a free reign for Yahoo! to run wild on your minimum bid prices, bearing in mind the opaque nature of the bid marketplace, only Yahoo! can see this information. Potentially, there could be some crazy minimum bid increases which could really affect campaign costs. Anyone for a £10 minimum bid?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under sem, ppc, yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.