Yahoo! search marketing

A fast-evolving pay-per-click tool with the potential to deliver a great return-on-investment

Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), previously known as 'Overture', was the original pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tool. Adverts reach not only users of the Yahoo! search engine but can also be displayed on AltaVista, Lycos, Orange and even ITV's search engines as well.

Historically, Yahoo! advertisers could see exactly what traffic would cost them to acquire and even precisely how much competitors were willing to bid on certain phrases. Yahoo! effectively auctioned its advertising and was very straight forward to understand because of this. Yahoo! is currently evolving quickly to be more like Google, however. It has learned lessons from Google's AdWords system and it's PPC engine is changing to use a quality scoring system so that there is more to where your Ads will appear than just how much you are prepared to pay.

Advertisers can achieve great results with PPC advertising with the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft's adCenter. While Google has easily the biggest market share (circa 75% in the UK) YSM and AdCenter users can target the other 25%, particularly in competitive industries, with a great set of tools, achieving fantastic results.

Intergage users need to ask themselves if they can afford to turn away one in four Internet searchers.

How many searches can your business get?

Click the Keyword Assistant Tool and discover:

• how many times that keyword was searched on last month.
• related searches that include your keyword.

View bids

How much are other advertisers bidding?

Click the View Bids Tool and find out:

• what other advertisers are bidding for specific keywords.
• the titles and descriptions other advertisers use for those keywords.

Determine your pricing

To get a sense of your monthly cost-per-keyword, use the following calculation:

Impressions (provided in the Keyword Selector Tool)
X
5% click-through rate (CTR)*
X
Cost-per-click (provided in View Bids Tool)

*5% CTR is provided for sample purposes only. Actual CTR may vary significantly.

Learn more

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a regular topic at Intergage's marketing seminars. If you have specific questions in the meantime, you can contact one of our specialists in the Client Services Team at any point for advice.