Importance Of Versatile PPC Platforms
Google has been growing all these years in paid search advertising revenues with its Adwords program, while Yahoo! and MSN have always been playing catch-up with Google in this space. Obviously, Google must have done things that Yahoo! and MSN have not been doing right during the past couple of years.
Even with the success of Google in paid search advertising over MSN and Yahoo!, it is not only because Google has a much higher search market share and a larger reach in traffic distribution partners. It is the well-designed and versatile advertising platform (Adwords) that Google has been continuously building which contributed to the success.
Flexibility
Adwords has been offering and creating many flexible features such as position preference bidding, preferred cost-bidding, ad scheduling, geo-targeting by countries and smaller regions, and language targeting in over 20 languages. Any of these features can be enabled within your Adwords account within a few clicks.
However, for instance with Yahoo! Overture it was unable to geo-target by country in a single advertising account, while Adwords allows advertisers to geo-target multiple countries or as many as countries and regions.
Time Efficiency
Adwords can provide advertisers the ease of setting up campaigns in a very time-efficient manner. Each Adwords account is structured in a logical manner: campaigns, adgroups, ads and keywords. This structure enables many arrangement possibilities, for instance the one-to-many relation of adgroup-to-keywords which makes the editing of ads really time-efficient.
Reporting and Tracking
With reporting on all levels (account, campaign, adgroup, ad and keyword), advertisers are able to easily review how their marketing budgets are distributed. On top of that, the impression share metrics were made available in some of the higher level reports.
With Google conversion tracking, advertisers can track their search engine marketing results by leads, purchases and sales with very detailed information. The setup of the already-built-in tracking system is as simple as copy-and-paste.
Yahoo! Overture has a similar tracking feature, however, it is limited to only track the simplest figures such as number of conversions.
Self Service
Adwords is a system that requires minimal interactions between human editorial and advertisers. The problem with Yahoo! Overture was that it required extensive human resources in reviewing ads and keywords.
Last year Google even launched a simple version of Adwords called the Starter Edition, which would allow any non-savvy person in PPC to start a simple text ad campaign within minutes, as long as they own a credit card and a website.
However, if you have a cost-sensitive target or you do not have the time, you can always ask the PPC professionals to setup and manage your paid search marketing campaigns with a fee.
Yahoo! and MSN Playing Catch-up
Yahoo! realized it was time to re-develop a more versatile platform. This new Yahoo! Search Marketing system (or Panama) was set to launch in Q3 of 2006, though currently it is still migrating its user-base from the old platform (Overture).
Panama’s migration of the existing user-base could be a delay, however, its much improved usability, flexibility, reporting and conversion tracking are really important. As long as Yahoo! can improve its relevancy and then its search market share, it is not impossible that Yahoo! Search Marketing will be able to keep up with Adwords.
MSN was the late candidate in launching its paid search advertising platform, Adcenter in which its beta version came out in late 2005. From the beginning, it realized the necessity to have a platform which is flexible and well-structured. The only major issues are that MSN does not really have the high traffic volume that even Yahoo! has, and Adcenter is not yet very user-friendly comparing to Adwords.
However, it seems no matter what Yahoo! and MSN have done, Google’s traffic is growing month-on-month in the US.
Search market share in the US in April 2007 (according to Hitwise)
Google: 65.26%
Yahoo!: 20.73%
MSN / Live: 8.46%
Ask: 3.69%
Search market share in the US in March 2007 (according to Hitwise)
Google: 64.13%
Yahoo!: 21.26%
MSN: 9.15%
Ask: 3.48%
Search market share in the US in April 2006 (according to Hitwise)
Google: 58.64%
Yahoo!: 22.21%
MSN: 12.59%
Ask: 4.22%
Posted in: Adcenter, Adwords, Google, MSN, PPC, Research, YSM, Yahoo
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