Yahoo! Search Marketing

History

Yahoo! Search Marketing as 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 UK search tools such as Yahoo!, MSN Search AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Tiscali and Wanadoo. However, it is likely to lose a large part of its market coverage once MSN launches its own PPC service.

Strengths

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides coverage within the search results of Yahoo! and MSN, which each hold around a 15% share of the UK search market. Larger text adverts are allowed than on Google AdWords, enabling a user to consider your offering in more depth before clicking on your advert, which we have found can result in a higher conversion rate.

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 £20 per month minimum spend requirement can mean this channel is not cost-effective compared to Google AdWords.

If you are looking to start running pay-per-click advertising with 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.