Heather Paulson today reports, with screenshots, on a preview of Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform.

For the better part of the last five years, tools made available to search marketers have been focused around the concept of managing bids and budgets.

But marketers are more concerned with goal-oriented metrics: What is my customer acquisition cost? What’s my return on investment? And what’s the volume of customers I can acquire at a given commitment level?

Yahoo!’s search marketing functionality had been sorely lagging its competition’s – they have announced they will finally start factoring ad quality into as ranking in 2007. This puts them back in the game. Expect Google and MSN to follow suit with similar functionality sooner rather than later.