As of today, when creating or modifying you ads in Yahoo! Sponsored Search, the short description is required. Following e-mail was sent to advertisers today:
Dear Advertiser,
As of today, short descriptions are now required when you create or modify your ads.
To remind you of two important changes:
1. Short descriptions are now required when you create/modify an ad.
Short descriptions continue to have a 70-character limit. Long descriptions continue to have a 190-character limit and are now optional.2. Yahoo! Search results will display 70-character descriptions in June 2007.
If you only have long descriptions for your ads, the description will be cut off to fit within the 70-character limit at the nearest complete word followed by an ellipsis, when it is displayed on Yahoo!. This may impact the performance of your ads.
It kind of took me by a surprise, since I have been using short description since I have started to advertise with Yahoo! Sponsored Search and had no idea short was optional. In fact I used the same 70 characters description for both. Long description did not really matter, I rarely use “content match” anyway. But I guess the impact can be huge if for example one used 190 characters description and if you have a “call to action” in that description, you may just end up with an ad that has no “call to action”.
On the other note, since complaining about Panama performance few days ago, I have noticed some dramatic improvement in one of my campaigns. When moving to the new platform back in December, one of my campaigns, which was meant to target only US market was receiving traffic from Canada. After adjusting the GEO targeting and completely turning off “content match” across all campaigns, things are slowly returning to were I am making money again.