So Yahoo recently updated their PPC quality score, which now includes your conversion metrics.  What this means is that if you have conversion tracking in place, Yahoo will use that to increase your quality score, which effectively means that you’ll be paying less per click than you were before.  Why would Yahoo want to do this?  Well, it’s a smart thing, if they can identify those ads that are converting, then they’re obviously the more relevant ads.  Giving those relevant ads a leg up in the rankings can only help the relevance of their SERPs as a whole.  Also, this is going to push more people to using their conversion tracking, which will give them more of a complete picture of the effectiveness of their system, and what company doesn’t love to get more data on their business?

Barry over at SERoundtable goes the darker route, asking what is to stop Yahoo from, at some point in the future, increasing the price for converting ads.  After all they’re making money for that company, so why shouldn’t Yahoo get a bigger piece of that pie?  I don’t see that happening, because apart from the PR disaster if they tried it, people would just then switch off their conversion tracking on Panama, and just track it through their analytics software.