A few months ago, Yahoo! alerted advertisers to an upcoming change to their advertising charging. The new changes were aimed at aligning charging from partner sites with the quality of traffic.

Here’s a snippet from the email:

“As you know, when you advertise with Yahoo!, your traffic can come from both Yahoo! sites and partners’ sites in our distribution network. As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen our marketplace, Yahoo! plans to soon expand the adjustments we make to click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network. This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic. We expect to launch this enhancement in late August or early September 2009.”

Last week, Yahoo! announced that the changes are now live and a new Ad Delivery Report will help advertisers make sense of the changes and optimize their campaigns.

“ Yahoo! is launching some new features that will let you know which Yahoo! partners are providing you traffic, and charge you according to the performance of the traffic you receive.”

The Ad Delivery Report, when combined with Yahoo!’s analytics options, will allow advertisers to pin point which campaigns are converting. (Wow – hasn’t Google been offering that for decades)

What is interesting is the new pricing model. Yahoo! has cleverly suggested that the new pricing model aims to offer discounts on click sources that are known to provide lower quality traffic.

But there’s a catch. Advertisers can expect “potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic”. Of course they expect the impact to be positive for most advertisers.

“How does it affect you? Based on our analysis, we expect that most advertisers will see click charges drop or remain unchanged, while a small fraction of advertisers may experience an increase in click charges.”

The real impact of the change will become apparent in the coming weeks. This all seems like Yahoo! are playing catch up with their advertising platform functionality. As for the new pricing model, if advertisers’ costs go up, there’ll be a serious backlash – something Yahoo! cant afford at this stage.

If you’re running Yahoo! advertising campaigns, let us know how the changes impact your spend and advertising performance.