Yahoo! has announced changes to its paid search service allowing advertisers to distribute ads across more sites and convert Google AdWords data for use on the engine.
Yahoo! says that the aim of the enhancements is to offer more control over ads to those who place them.
The new Network Distribution feature enables advertisers to run pay per click ads on Yahoo!'s search pages, partner sites or both.
Marketers who run ads across the entire network will be able set different bids for the search engine or its partner sites.
Elsewhere, those who place ads across different search engines can convert data from one to the other more easily with the help of a new tool.
The feature lets advertisers convert data from Google AdWords into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns by importing their files, an offering that Yahoo! says will encourage more companies to use its paid search service.
For those who work with account representatives from Yahoo!, a new web to mobile migration tool allows marketers to shift a standard pay per click campaign to its mobile paid search platform, while another feature adds relevant long tail keywords to a campaign automatically.
"Additionally, we know that advertisers can add thousands of keywords/terms into their account at any given time, so we built a tool that can group them into ad groups by relevance automatically," says David Pann, vice president and general manager of search marketing at Yahoo! in a blog post.
Yahoo! currently accounts for 3.1 per cent of the UK search market, according to Experian Hitwise.
