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20 July 2007, 00:13
Yahoo and MSN: The Untapped PPC Goldmine
This is a great article that explains why most people
are missing the boat when it comes to PPC marketing.
Enjoy! - Joe Lavery
Yahoo and MSN: The Untapped PPC Goldmine
By Mark Roth
Given the current dominance of Google in the Pay Per Click (PPC)
advertising market, it can be easy to forget that it wasn't always
top dog. Yet Google was actually a latecomer to PPC technology,
which was first popularized by Goto.com in the late 1990's. Goto
became Overture, now a part of Yahoo, and for several years was
the biggest player in PPC.
What allowed Google to overtake (and quickly dominate) the PPC
field was its innovations in terms of making PPC more effective
for advertisers and for end users. Rather than let the highest
bidder get the top advertising spot, as was customary for other
search engines, Google took into account the relevancy of the
ad to what searchers were looking for. This meant that people
searching Google were more likely to click on ads, and
advertisers with highly relevant campaigns did not necessarily
have to outbid their competitors.
This may sound like a subtle difference, but it was one of the
major factors that allowed Google to catapult itself from
start-up to having a market cap more than three times that
of Yahoo. However, Google's current dominance in PPC
advertising is not guaranteed to remain, nor does it prevent
advertisers from using other high-quality sources of traffic.
For many PPC marketers, Google has long been the only game in
town because of the advantages it offers. At the same time,
it's two main competitors in the PPC arena, Yahoo and MSN,
have invested heavily in updating their technology to regain
a competitive edge. Yahoo in particular released its new
Panama system for its Yahoo Search Marketing service in
February 2007, which is designed to bring it to the cutting
edge of highly relevant text ads.
What may come as a surprise to PPC users is that some of the
top PPC affiliate marketers have long used all three main PPC
advertising sources (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) with great success.
While the press may represent Google as being the only game
in town, in reality it only controls 2/3 of search engine
traffic. That leaves more than 30% of the market for marketers
to target through Yahoo, MSN, and smaller players. And for
serious marketers, 30% of the market is enough to seriously
investigate the possibilities.
The most important figure for online advertisers when deciding
where to spend their marketing budget is return on investment
(ROI). If Yahoo and MSN can offer a similar ROI to that of
Google's, then by all means, they should be included in your
advertising efforts. What I have found in my own experience
is that even though the quantity of traffic from Yahoo and
MSN is lower, the quality is very good.
The key to discovering the most profitable use of your
advertising dollars is to try different sources of traffic
and track the results. If you don't know your precise
ROI to begin with, then there will be no way to determine
how to improve it. With PPC marketing, conversion tracking
is the only way to accurately gather data on different
traffic sources and ultimately put together an optimized
advertising campaign. For any marketer who does test the
waters with Yahoo and MSN, they are likely to find high
quality traffic and lower competition from marketers who
still think that Google is the only way to go.
Mark Roth is a full-time PPC affiliate marketer, and has
generated more than 1 million conversions using Google,
Yahoo, and MSN search advertising. He is also the
developer of Affiliate Radar, the ultimate tool for
PPC affiliate marketing, and the only solution for
transferring PPC campaigns between the Google, Yahoo,
and MSN networks.
To learn more, visit
http://clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/?1YW3pHJoO3pOtOOr3WOmLg
Enjoy!
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