PromotionWorld
Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. “Google, regardless of it’s [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals,” he says. “It’s important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process.”
For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you’re positioning a product for the younger set, “there’s still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo,” Henige says.
Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online–and tended to attract searchers from the “affluent suburbia” and “upscale America” brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, “gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start,” Henige says.
Search Marketing Standard
Yahoo shares a wealth of usability testing data and Web site design experience with Webmasters through its new Developer Center, and Kevin Gold reviews some of the Center’s offerings. “Yahoo has exposed their testing results on issues ranging from ratings and reviews, reputation, navigational structure, ad placement layouts, bead-crumb navigation best practices and wire-framing tools,” he says. “In my past experience, I have spent considerable time searching for this grade of information and have often paid for best practices based on valid testing. Now it’s free.” For example, Yahoo has tested a number of reputation monitoring tools and has posted the results in the Developer Center, including case studies as well as precautions. Gold also suggests tapping the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) blog for more design and usability info.
by Mark Walsh
Bullish financial projections released by Yahoo Tuesday could lead Microsoft to boost its original $44.6 billion bid for the Web portal, according to Internet analysts. That was certainly Yahoo’s intention in disclosing a plan detailing Yahoo’s financial and strategic goals–initially presented to investors in December 2007–to back up its claim that Microsoft’s proposed offer “substantially undervalues” the company.
CNET News
After years of standing on opposite sides of the click fraud fence, Yahoo and Click Forensics have partnered to help tackle the issue for Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers. As Elinor Mills notes, “There have been calls for an independent third party to oversee the business, but advertisers don’t want to give up their server data to search engines and vice versa. The Yahoo-Click Forensics relationship seems like a step in that direction.”
While neither company has detailed exactly what click info they’ll be sharing, both Tom Cuthbert, CEO of Click Forensics, and Reggie Davis, Yahoo’s click quality czar, said that the goal is to come up with a “better consensus click fraud rate than the widely disparate figures now being reported, and to make advertisers more confident in the system,” Mills says.