Yahoo Inc is set to unveil several tools on Tuesday to help marketers better target their online adverts, as the Internet company tries to win back business during a recession, the Wall Street Journal said, citing senior company officials.

Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL.

The new services include targeting graphical adverts to users who have searched for particular terms in Yahoo's search engine and customizing the offers in adverts based on what Web sites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites, the paper said.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text adverts next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on factors such as their age and gender, according to the paper.

Targeting a site with a couple hundred thousand users...I don't call that targeting. I call that wasted effort, the paper quoted Joanne Bradford, Yahoo's senior vice president of U.S. revenue and market development, as saying. Size does matter.

Bradford and Michael Walrath, a senior vice president at Yahoo, will discuss the new features during a keynote address at a conference in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, the paper said.

They will also use the speech to urge marketers to stop thinking about search and display advertising as separate products and to take advantage of tools such as Yahoo's search-targeting product to bridge the two, the pair told the paper in a joint interview.

(Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe)

Yahoo Google Ads