Yahoo! Search Marketing

History

Yahoo! Search Marketing was previously known as Overture (and before that, as GoTo until October 2001). It was the first company to offer pay-per-click advertising and is currently the second largest pay-per-click provider to English language search tools and a number of foreign language sites. Overture was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003 and this service has established a wide coverage of many key Australian and global search tools such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Ansearch and Fairfax Digital sites. However, it is likely to lose a large part of its market coverage once Micosoft launches its own PPC service.

Strengths

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides coverage within the search results of Yahoo! and other search engines, which each hold around a 10% share of the Australian search market. Larger text adverts are allowed, compared to Google AdWords, plus the lower levels of advertiser competition can result in more favourable bid rates and often a better conversion rate and cost.

Weaknesses

Yahoo! Search Marketing reviews many adverts manually before advertisers can use them, which, combined with an aging management system, means that it can be cumbersome to make small changes and test different versions of an advert on an account. For smaller advertisers the AU$40 per month minimum spend requirement can mean this channel is not cost-effective compared to Google AdWords.

If you're looking to start running pay-per-click advertising with Yahoo! Search Marketing or any of these providers or need to improve the effectiveness of your current campaign, find out more about our PPC management service or contact us now for more information. Alternatively, please request a FREE website assessment and see what you could achieve with a successful search engine marketing campaign.