skibum - 3:51 pm on Feb 24, 2009 (gmt 0)

Search Retargeting, which gives advertisers the ability to target display advertising based on user search activities;

Could work very well. Will be interesting to see how important the time factor is in there. How fast does the users' interest fade after the search?

Enhanced Retargeting, which allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo! network based on user activity on an advertiser's site; and

Advertising.com and others have had this type of targeting for years and it seems an advertiser will still spend $10 in media fees for every $1 dollar generated in sales from banner click-throughs even with this targeting.

When view-through impressions are given credit for sales (basically - a consumer goes to an advertisers site, then Yahoo! drops a cookie in the browser, when that person goes to a site in the Yahoo! network, that person gets served ads for the site they visited previously. Even if the person doesn't click on the ad but merely "views" it [could be below the fold and not even be seen by the person by Y! may do that differently] the sale is credited back to the ad campaign) and the performance of the campaign looks great - as if you are generating $10 in sales for every dollar spent on media.

This kind of technology can give David Copperfield a run for the money! It is debatable as to whether the banners that "generate" view-through conversions actually do anything or if they are just taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway. It is basically a way to justify spending on banner media buys that don't really work IMHO.

Enhanced Targeting capabilities for search advertising, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search.

Goos start but Google match types would be more powerful for advertisers IMHO.

Nice to see them taking some positive steps in any case.