Pay-per-click advertising: Yahoo! Search Marketing Reader Offer

It’s tempting to rely on Google for internet advertising campaigns, particularly pay-per-click advertising. After all they’re the biggest show in town. However, Google is not the only gay in the village and main rivals Yahoo! Search Marketing have a slice of the pay-to-click market that’s simply too big to ignore.

Formally Overture, Yahoo! doesn’t just manage per-per-click advertising on the world’s second largest search engine. They also look after a whole host of others, like Lycos and AltaVista. And Yahoo! Search Marketing places pay-per-click advertising on the sites of major media companies, like the Guardian and ITV, and claims to reach eighty per cent of internet users.

Pay-per-click not only ranks among the most revolutionary aspects of internet marketing, it’s incredibly simple too. Advertisers pick out key words and phrases that potential customers might use to find their offer and bid to appear in the advertising space next to search results. So I might bid for ‘public relations consultant’ or ‘copywriting’. The minimum bid can be as low as 5p and advertisers set a daily budget to ensure they never get burned.

Then if someone searches Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista, et al for ‘public relations consultant’ and mine’s the winning bid my ad will appear. I only pay if they actually click the ad. Pay-per-click advertising delivers customers who have expressed an interest in the advertiser’s business and have chosen to respond to their advertisement.

That makes for good quality leads and pay-per-click is incredibly cost effective too. A direct mail campaign, say, requires the advertiser to acquire a mailing list, commission creative, design and print. Then there’s posting it to arrive in a pile of mail when the customer may not be in the mood.

Yet Yahoo!’s pay-per-click advertising offer doesn’t stop there. Advertisers may also appear on websites like that of the mobile phone company Orange when their pages include those same key words. If I’m bidding on ‘public relations consultant’ and the Guardian uses that phrase in an article, my ad may well appear alongside.

At time of writing, Yahoo! is crediting new accounts with £50 just to kick them off. So it’s risk free.
(Last updated: 8 March 2007)

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