The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

The marketplace in which we bid on keywords to drive traffic to our websites is a bustling, high speed micro-economy.  In this metaphor, expanding your existing Google campaign out to Yahoo and MSN may feel like expanding your company internationally for the first time.  There seems to be a whole new set of rules, a whole new set of management headaches, and for many novice search advertisers, the costs appear to outweigh the benefits.  After all, with Google's market share in the U.S. at upwards of 70% (last time I checked), it may seem like most of your customers use Google, and you can reach them well enough that way.  But the truth is, Yahoo and MSN are not radically different foreign lands -- Yahoo and MSN understand well the position they're in, and they try hard to make it easy for people who take the leap over from Google, by providing a similar user interface to Google AdWords, similar rules and tools, and simple methods for account setup based on your AdWords data (see our recent posts about converting AdWords account data into Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter). 

Getting your account set up on the #2 and #3 search engines has the obvious advantage of helping you reach the other 30% of the market.  But there are also many unique benefits to each of these products.  Even though they strive to make their offering seem familiar to AdWords users, they also bring their own unique audiences, and unique functionality, and often provide better value with lower CPCs and less competition from other advertisers.  There are significant differences between the three search engines (and Clickable makes it easy to manage your campaigns across all three).  When you do this, you may find that Yahoo and MSN can be different in very beneficial ways.  Here are some differences to think about.

1. Different Demographics - The audience on Yahoo and MSN is rather different from that of Google.  This is apparent when you type in yahoo.com or msn.com into your browser, as these are both destination sites, rich with content: news, games, celebrity gossip, fitness tips, Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail services.  Yahoo and MSN are just as much about entertainment and communication as they are about information. Compare this to Google's simple, spartan, utilitarian search interface, and it's no surprise that Yahoo and MSN tend to skew slightly to a female demographic, according to HitWise.  They report that a majority of Google users are male, while a majority of MSN and Yahoo users are female.  This means that if you offer wedding planning services, greeting cards, spa treatments, horoscopes, or other products that appeal to a primarily female customer base, then Google's market share advantage in your area is probably less than 70%.
   
2. Different Traffic Source - On Google, most searches result from someone going to www.google.com and submitting their query.  In contrast, MSN and Yahoo are portal sites with search boxes.  They get relatively fewer searches from people who go directly to http://search.yahoo.com or http://www.live.com, and more from people who use the search box that floats above their email, game, or article.  This means that the typical MSN or Yahoo searcher will come to the search results page in a different mindset.  Depending on what you offer, this may work to your advantage.  Speculatively, people who search for consumer products out of thier web mail interface are more likely to have just received some word of mouth advice.
   
3. Less Competition - If you've been hesitant or slow to get onto Yahoo and MSN, chances are many of your competitors aren't there yet either.  For what you offer, the competition may be much less, which means favorable costs-per-click for you.
4. Different Account Options - Yahoo and MSN each have some unique options, which do not exist in the other two major engines.  For example. Yahoo defines keywords somewhat differently from Google and MSN, in that plurals, singulars, and other suffixed and derived forms of keywords are all lumped together.  If you specify caterer in your account, you get caterers, catering, and cater all along with it.  That's a big help if you're not a linguist and don't enjoy trying to think of every possible variant of every word.  (It may not be a serious problem, but you're probably missing some differently-suffixed variants in your Google AdWords account).

None of the items listed above necessarily means that MSN or Yahoo are better for you than Google AdWords.  These are not so much benefits as differences.  The benefit of advertising on #2 and #3 search engines is that you can reach a new group of people and find out if they are the right audience, or the more cost-effective audience for you.  Advertisers typically find that the same ads for the same website will generate different click-through rates and different conversion rates between search engines - often quite dramatically. The Yahoo or MSN audience might be perfect for you -- or terrible for you, or about the same as Google --, but you won't really know until you try.

Ehren, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

The MSN audience isn't terrible... it is nonexistent.  I decided to try MSN AdCenter two months ago.  In those two months the campaign had had only one impression!  ONE!  In comparison, a Google Adwords account with the exact same setup has seen 14,000 impressions in that time(along with lots of clicks and conversions).