It has been a very busy week in the field of online advertising, with the ongoing attempts from Microsoft to purchase Yahoo and Yahoo’s subsequent rejection of the offer, you would have thought that both parties would have been pre-occupied with their current wranglings. Yet, both Yahoo and Microsoft have made annoucements this week relating to pay-per-click advertising.

Microsoft unveiled plans to beta test (from the 1st of March) a new way of measuring online advertising effectiveness. Instead of the traditional “last ad-clicked” approach of todays current search advertising platforms, they are looking into what they are terming “engagement mapping”. This will provide an overview of which adverts a person has seen over a specific length of time and the influence that it has had in a person’s decision to purchase a product. How Microsoft intend to do this is vague at the moment but hopefully we will be able to see results of this beta fairly soon after the start and should be able to gain an idea of how Microsoft are logging this.

Yahoo on the other hand are set to remove the $0.10 price fix on the current minimum bid on their search advertising. Now this could be a big bonus for some search engine optimisations (SEO) companies and their pay per click (PPC) campaigns but could also lead to bidding wars driving up prices on particularly competitive keywords and phrases. If you have chosen your keywords carefully then you could find that you have hit upon a potential goldmine as your return on investment increases as your costs decrease.

As with all new implementations it will take time to see tangible results for both of these ideas, but they certainly should be followed closely for the near future.