Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo Search Marketing is Yahoo’s branded marketing system on Yahoo and partner site search results.  Yahoo has added a lot of extras to the old search listing advertisement. 

Targeting Customers

 Yahoo Search Marketing boasts many features:

  • Reach – advertisers reach people through 2.7 billion monthly Yahoo searches.  With that many searches happening, every advertiser can find a keyword match for their business or offering.
  • Ad testing – advertisers rotate many ads, then keep the ones people click most often.
  • Keyword Suggestions – Yahoo helps people find keywords related to their offerings.
  • Forecasting – advertisers see how many clicks their ad might receive, and thus determine their cost-per-click maximum.
  • Real time reporting
  • Excellent customer support

But most importantly, Yahoo Search Marketing offers targeting in a number of ways.  Advertisers target people based on:

  • Keywords
  • Location
  • Demographics
  • Time of Day

Specific audiences click more often on interesting ads.  So advertisers get top value for their dollar by narrowly targeting their audience.

Examples

 A 24 hour gym knows its market is people under 40 who are night owls.  The gym purchases keywords – fitness, workout, gym – but only results on searches between 11PM and 2AM.  Since the gym isn’t a chain, it also targets people within 10 miles of a specific zip code.  Now those people looking for gyms at night find the 24 hour gym, and the 24 hour gym gets new customers.

A music publisher has a new teen boy band, and wants to advertise their music tour and new CD.  Yahoo suggests keywords “Jonas Brothers” because they’re a popular boy band.  The publisher chooses only weekends and weekdays after 3PM, when teenage girls get out of school.  The publisher tries two ads, one with the band’s logo and one with a photo of the boys.  Testing shows them more people (teenage girls) click the photo ad, so they pull the logo ad.

Conclusion 

Yahoo Search Marketing, like other search engine ad systems, is a slick package on simple search engine advertising.  But while simple, the system delivers traffic to advertisers if they use it well.

Categories: Glossary
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