Yahoo! advertisers could soon be given the opportunity to integrate multimedia elements into traditional pay per click campaigns if a beta test of the search engine’s new Rich Ads in Search program is successful. The experiment, currently open to a select band of branded advertisers only, allows advertisers to add video, image and custom search boxes to sponsored search results. More About Yahoo! Rich Media PPC Ads.

SEM pioneer Google has paved the way for multimedia advertising under the PPC model with its video, mobile and image advertising but its a route that Yahoo! has previously resisted. Since December though, the search engine has been looking to increase ad revenues. Since announcing a drop in profits for the last quarter of 2008, the need to increase search relevance and close the gap to rivals Google has re-ignited enthusiasm for the Rich Ads trial.

The new ad formats are intended to combine the relevance of Yahoo!’s sponsored search results with the attention grabbing impact of rich media formats such as video. So far, results have been encouraging with advertisings participating in the experiment reporting an increase in click through rates by as much as 25%.

Currently rich media PPC ad formats are available by invitation only. Ask your Top Position account manager to keep you informed when the program is rolled out to all advertisers.