Advertise on Yahoo! Search to pre-qualified customers

There is no cost for advertising on Yahoo except what you pay for the clicks on your advertisement. That’s why this is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising. You only pay for the visitors you get, and you never pay more than you want.

When someone searches for something on Yahoo, and you have a keyword that matches the search, you compete for advertising space on the Yahoo search results page. This is a very good place to advertise in, since you always know that the person is searching for something you offer.

Example: If the search is for “where can i buy a new car”, and one of your keywords is “buy car”, there is a partial match that may trigger your ad for display.

An auction-based bidding process determines what ranking you get among the competing advertisements. You set your bid to the highest amount you’re willing to pay if the user clicks on your ad. So if you bid $1 for “buy car”, and the user clicks on your ad, you pay up to $1 for the click. If the user doesn’t click on your ad, there is no charge at all.

The most effective form of online advertising

Over the recent years, search engine advertising has totally redefined how businesses market online:

• Your advertisement is only shown when there is a search that relates to your business. Customers who click on your ads are pre-qualified, motivated and looking for what you have to offer.
• The cost for each lead is set by you, in an auction-based bidding process. By adjusting your advertisement bid, you have full control of the cost of acquiring new customers.
• You pay only for good, targeted leads, giving a high return on your advertising investment.
• You can set an exact daily budget for your advertising expenses. You know in advance exactly how much your online advertising is going to cost.
• You can send new visitors directly to special landing pages, depending on what they search for. For “cheap vacuum cleaners” you can use one landing page; for “industrial vacuum cleaners” another.
• You get detailed statistics that show how often your ads were shown for each search term, how often the ad was clicked, and how much you actually paid for each search term.
• With conversion tracking, you can also see how many leads or sales each search term generated. After a few weeks, you will have enough information to raise the bid on the most profitable search terms and remove any unprofitable keywords.
• The search engine advertising price model favors advertisements with a high click-through ratio, giving them a more prominent placement even if they have a lower bid. This enables smaller companies with niche products or a local market to compete with established, brand-name heavy-weights.

With Yahoo, you pay only for the clicks you get

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) handles the advertising for several search engines in the Yahoo! family. With one advertising buy, you’ll also be listed on other search engines and portals on the Web, e.g. AltaVista, InfoSpace, CNN, AlltheWeb and Excite.

You don’t have to register in each search engine, or manually update your advertisements there. Yahoo! takes care of all that, letting you control all your web advertisements across all distribution channels from one single point of control. Content Match™ extends your reach by displaying your listings also near relevant articles, product reviews and more.

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s advertisers receive over 170 million highly targeted sales leads each month. Tap into the searches occurring in your industry and put your site directly in front of customers searching for what you’re selling. Target major international markets like the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Australia, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, all in their native languages.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing, you set the price you’re willing to pay for each sales lead. An automatic auction process determines the position of your advertisement on the Yahoo! search results page. The higher you bid, the higher you get.

There are no monthly, annual or service charges. You pay only when your customers click through to your site. All you need to do is to set your maximum bids and add the budgeted amount of advertising charges to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. 

Bidding on the keywords that make money

Your advertisement is shown in the Yahoo! search results whenever the search is for one of the keywords or phrases that customers use when searching for products or companies like yours. If you sell vacuum cleaners, you may want to bid on search terms like “upright vacuum cleaner”, “canister vacuum” and perhaps “hand vac” or “car vac” if you also sell smaller appliances.

You are free to select any keywords to trigger the display of your advertisement, as long as they can be considered relevant for your business. A powerful Keyword Suggestion Tool helps you find the phrases that your customers use the most often. And when they do, be sure to catch their attention with your advertisement!

The minimum bid for a keyword is 10¢/click. Advertisements are sorted according to bids and click frequencies so that the most popular advertisements with the highest bids appear at the top.

The bids are higher for broad search terms like “vacuum cleaner” than for more precise search terms like “small red canister vacuum cleaner” where there is less competition for the advertising space. Since Yahoo only charges per click, not per keyword, you can essentially have as many search terms you wish, to exploit the lower cost of exact search terms.

If your business is local you can also fine-tune your advertisement even further by having them appear only for customers in your neighborhood, or in the regions or countries where you do business. You can also decide not to show your ad, or show a different ad, depending on the visitor’s language.

If your ad is well written, your keywords well chosen, and your bid amount competitive, you could be up there competing with “the big guys” just minutes after your advertisement has been approved.

“But I already advertise on Google”

Google accounts for slightly less than half the search engine market. Still many people believe that by advertising on Google, they reach all their potential customers. Yahoo and their distribution network represents almost one fourth of all search engine traffic. By advertising on Yahoo, you increase your market coverage by nearly 50%!

Different search engines reach different cross-sections of the population. An advertising campaign that fails on Google can be very successful on Yahoo, because they cater for different demographics.

Since most advertisers begin advertising on Google, and many never get any farther, advertising bids are generally higher on Google than on Yahoo. Even if you are aggressively outbid on the over-crowded Google arena, there may still be plenty of room for you on Yahoo.

Use Yahoo FastTrack assisted setup for a fast start

For a marketing professional, search engine advertising may sound complicated at first. Take advantage of Yahoo’s professional FastTrack assisted setup option to get expert assistance, faster turnaround and free account optimization.

FastTrack assisted setup helps you get the most out of your advertising investment on Yahoo! Sponsored Search:

• Expert recommendations: A Sponsored Search specialist reviews your site and makes recommendations based on your budget and traffic objectives.
• Professionally Written Listings: With your recommendations in mind, Yahoo selects search terms, create advertisements and recommend bid amounts for you.
• Customized Reports: Your proposal includes search listings that are highly customized, persuasive and meet the Sponsored Search relevancy guidelines.
• Full control: Ability to submit specific terms, budget considerations and site focus areas for our specialists to consider when creating your personalized proposal.
• Free Addition of Tracking URLs: The tracking URLs will enable you to see the source of traffic by keyword coming from Sponsored Search.
• Fast Turnaround: Receive a customized proposal in three business days.
• Free Account Optimization: A Sponsored Search specialist completely reviews the performance of your advertisments and suggests changes to keywords, titles or descriptions.
• Six Months of Gold Service: Receive priority service for all your customer service needs.