• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 2, 2005

Yahoo!'s search marketing division, formerly known as Overture, plans to test several new features for advertisers, including placing listings into graphical banner formats, and including images alongside listings, a Yahoo! spokeswoman said last week. The Yahoo! search marketing division also is testing new distribution options, such as RSS feeds, for its contextual advertisers, the spokeswoman said.

"In the next several weeks we do plan tests for putting sponsored listings in a banner, graphical format, which will show up on our network sites based on their relevancy to page's content," the spokeswoman said. "They will be dynamic, appearing as banners ad and then transforming into sponsored links."

Yahoo! has no plans to charge for such ads on a cost-per-thousand impression basis, said the spokeswoman.

The acknowledgement by Yahoo! came just days after Google detailed its own plans to enter the banner advertising space, adding an animated graphical ad format. On Monday it said AdSense advertisers will be able to purchase ad space on the sites of specific publishers, and serve image ads through AdSense.

Yahoo!'s search marketing division to this point has specialized in text-based sponsored listings, which appear with search results and as contextual ads on content pages.

In early March, Yahoo! confirmed that it began to consider expanding its search-advertising program for publishers. Yahoo's sponsored listings currently appear on a limited number of other sites, but analysts expect the company to offer a broader program, similar to Google's self-service AdSense program, in which a wider variety of publishers can run Yahoo's ads.