Ads in search on the two partners will be powered by Bing, and their combined audience is estimated at 150 million Americans and over half a billion people worldwide. All of the ads will be served from Microsoft AdCenter.  The two companies are currently working out the technology details, so all of your ads on either network will stay the same for the time being. The hope is to have everything running off of the Microsoft AdCenter by Q4 2010 to capture the valuable holiday season.

What this means for advertisers

If you manage or use either Yahoo! or Bing search advertising, then nothing will change for a few months. The new merger should reach out to all advertisers with ample notice and instruction on moving over accounts, or possibly have everything moved over automatically. We will see how this works out in the Fall or possibly later. There is no hard deadline set for the transition, but it is coming.

The combination of the advertisers may end up affecting your campaigns in more ways than just an interface change. With the combination of searchers, there will also be a combination of advertisers. Currently if you run campaigns in both search engines you are competing in separate auctions for your PPC ads. This split can keep the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) lower because the number of advertisers (bidders) is lower. With this new merger, the combined pool of advertisers may cause the CPC to go up for some of your keywords.

Currently we see the cost of keywords in Bing and Yahoo! to be between 40%-60% of the cost of the same words in AdWords for similar position. These cost savings are a primary motivator to advertise on the Yahoo! and Microsoft platforms. While this new paring will grow the number of searchers it could also increase the bottom line. We won’t know for sure until the move is completed, but it may be a good idea to start planning for an increase in the cost of keywords.

The major benefit to advertisers is the consolidation of advertising. Search Alliance will become a one-stop-shop for PPC advertising. The alliance will instantly become the #2 search advertising platform, so advertisers that run ads on Search Alliance and on Google AdWords can easily capture a large percent of the overall search market.

The bids for keywords will probably go up, but they are still not likely to be more expensive than AdWords. Google currently maintains about 80% of the search market, but that extra 20% can be the difference for some online advertisers. The new Search Alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft will make capturing that audience easier than it has been before.

You can subscribe to The SEM Blog to stay up-to-date with the changing landscape of Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click Advertising online.

January 31 2008 – Microsoft offers up it’s services to run Yahoo! in an unsolicited take over bid. Yahoo! thinks it over.

March 17 2008 – Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt says the deal is bad for the internet.

Meanwhile Yahoo!s stock rises on the news and Microsoft’s dips

Early April 2008 – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tells Yahoo! if it doesn’t except the offer they should expect a hostile takeover.

April 9 2008 – Yahoo! and Google announce a partnership in Pay Per Click ads. Yahoo! agrees to run some Google ads in Yahoo!s search results

April 30 2008 – Microsoft states that it wants to keep Yahoo! employees in court documents.

May 5 2008 – Microsoft announces that the deal is off. Ballmer states Yahoo!s deal with Google is a factor

Nothing happens for a little while

July 14 2008 – Microsoft does something we’ve all done once or twice in our life time – drunk dial. Microsoft teamed up with Yahoo! stock holder Carl C Ichan in a bid to take over Yahoo! giving them 24 hours to decide. Hahahaha, that was a funny one.

November 6 2008 – Google breaks off it’s deal with Yahoo! in shared advertising leaving some to question whether Google simply helped Yahoo! to thwart Microsoft’s take over attempt

November 18 2008 – Jerry Yang is out as Yahoo! CEO and Guy Kawasaki tells me to hold my breath

January 14 2009 – Carol Bartz is announced as the new head at Yahoo! only to be overshadowed by the Social Media Inauguration a week later

Search Engine Stocks Over the Past Year

Everyone took a hit over the last year, even Google but they still remain on top with shares trading at $303.08 as I am writing this.

Search Engine Stats Over the Past Year

So now that we are up to date how much was gained and lost by the search engines over the last year? Well you don’t have to be an analytics guru to see that Google made out quite alright in Market Share over the last year;

Google’s market share in March of 08 was 77.70%. As of last month they are now at 81.48%. Yahoo! went from 12.06% to 10.22%. Microsoft went from 3.25% to 2.95%

So while the #2 and #3 duke it out #1 continues to take over the market

So what does this all mean?

I’ve thrown a lot of information at you and the take away is this; if you are planning a marketing campaign in pay per click or SEO go where the market is. In the case the market is clearly in Google.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), a leading global brand and one of the world’s most trafficked Internet destinations, announced today that Carol Bartz, a veteran technology executive who was most recently Executive Chairman of Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), has been named Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Prior to becoming Executive Chairman of Autodesk in 2006, Bartz, 60, led Autodesk as CEO for 14 years, transforming the company into a leader in computer-aided design software. During her tenure as CEO, revenues increased from less than $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, and the company’s share price increased nearly ten-fold.

In addition to turning around Autodesk, Bartz’s extensive executive experience includes hands-on responsibility for leading global operations, engineering, sales and marketing organizations for large technology and engineering companies including Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation and 3M.

What does this mean for a future Yahoo/Microsoft merger? No one is saying anything yet but some sort of deal seems imminent

One thing is for sure at least Guy Kawasaki is off the hook.

For now

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

As regular readers of this blog can attest Yahoo! has had more downs than ups this year and the resigning of Yang is no big surprise.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yang will ‘stay on as a senior executive and board member’

What does this mean for Yahoo!, only time will tell but I’m sure Icahn and Microsoft are sharpening their fangs once again.

In the meantime the announcement of Yang stepping down sent the stock of Yahoo! soaring. TechCrunch reports that Yang is Yahoo!s $1.8 billion man.

So many questions to answer over the next little while and I think one that should be answered is – Guy Kawasaki are you ready to take the job this time?

Further Reading on Yahoo!s troubles

Google to Yahoo! – “It’s Been Nice but I Don’t Want to Fight For You”

Microsoft & Yahoo! the Saga Continues

Microsoft to Yahoo: I Think We Should See Other People

Microsoft to Yahoo! Employees – We Want You to Stay

The Search Engine World is Heating Up

Keeping Up with the Search Engines

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

In a letter to Yahoo! advertisers, Hilary Schneider, Executive VP, spoke of their disappointment in Google’s decision to leave their agreement but I’m sure with the hit Google took this year in the stock market the last thing they want to get into is a lengthy court battle that would cost millions of dollars to defend.

This leaves a lot more questions on the table concerning Yahoo!’s  future. Clearly Jerry Yang has been having a bad year and people are calling for his dismissal  so it will be interesting to see where this will end up.

In the meantime we’ll keep plugging away while Microsoft, who are probably sharpening their fangs, wait in the wings

Dear Advertiser,

We wanted to reach out to you directly regarding Google’s decision, announced earlier today, to terminate the advertising services agreement that the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement, and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s and advertisers’ concerns.
While disappointed by this turn of events, we are writing to you to reaffirm our commitment to working together to drive your advertising results, and to provide the continued leadership you expect. The fact is that this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search.

As you know, Yahoo! has long focused on how to improve the user, advertiser and publisher experience. We will continue to enable you to easily connect with the consumers you most want to reach, by creating a more open, efficient and effective marketplace for advertisers and publishers. We also plan to continue to provide the cutting-edge advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs and expects, by leading the way in helping advertisers navigate the converging contextual and search ad markets. Finally, we remain committed to innovation in anticipating the needs of Yahoo!’s audiences–one of the largest and most engaged populations of consumers on the web–by creating the unique context that delivers results for brand advertisers online.

In short, even in the absence of a commercial agreement with Google, we intend to become an ever-stronger player in online advertising. Our certainty on this front comes from the progress we continue to make in many areas, not the least of which are the significant innovations we’re making in search. We continually optimize our algorithmic and sponsored search. In fact, in 2008 alone, we have developed and launched hundreds of improvements to our search engine, including index expansions and updates, ranking models and performance tuning. Each of these features is designed to improve search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to our users.

Particularly in this economic climate, identifying and making rich and deep connections with your target audience is of the utmost importance. No company is better prepared to help you succeed in that quest than Yahoo!. In addition to being the largest aggregate publisher in the U.S., we are #1 or #2 across virtually every key category, including being #1 in the categories of News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment, and we’re putting our leadership to work for you every day.

By offering extensive reach to consumers, breakthrough advances in technology, simplifying inefficiencies in the advertising process, putting new and industry-recognized talent in place, and providing tailored solutions across our network to meet your needs, we are well prepared to provide you with the most significant return on your investment.

We are looking forward to continuing to work with you in building your business. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or anyone on our team with your questions, or to discuss your challenges. We’re open to a productive dialogue with you in the service of continuing our successful work together.

Warmest Regards,
Hilary Schneider
Executive Vice President, Yahoo! U.S.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

In positive Yahoo! news the hottest search commodity has announced it’s BOSS(Build Your Own Search) platform that will help ‘developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies… …build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index’

Yahoo!, recognizing the extreme talent base of its web users, is opening the doors in an effort to further improve its search product. BOSS is an open platform that lets partners ‘developers… …take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.’

In a blog post Yahoo! gave a quick summary of what is available to BOSS partners

• Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
• Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
• BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
• Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
• Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

At first glance this seems like a pretty cool thing but the first point above opens a Pandora’s box of possibilities. Allowing sites to ‘re-rank’ search results could potentially cloud search results on some less reputable sites giving top place to advertisers. I know what you are saying ‘We pay to have our ads on sites like Yahoo! and Google’ but you don’t pay to have your site on there organically(non paid).

Search manipulation aside this is a great thing for sites that want to offer a search function. There are no limits on queries per day and no restrictions on presentation. So, search as much as you want and make it look however you want, that’s pretty cool

More on what’s available to date:

Yahoo! has provided some examples of BOSS Partners

• Me.dium, a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.
• Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is able to deliver a language search experience that isn’t available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines.
• Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.
• Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

Get a BOSS Application ID(at time of posting login does not work )

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Microsoft teamed up with Yahoo! stockholder Carl C Ichan in a bid to take over Yahoo! and completely replace(fire) the entire board of directors and the top management team.

Wow, they must have had a few too many Grey Goose martinis if they thought that one would have passed.

Yahoo! Chairman Roy Bostock had the following to say in an official release from Yahoo!;

“This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!’s stockholders in mind. Clearly, Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr. Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft, but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. Yahoo’s Board of Directors will not allow that to happen. Yahoo!’s Board remains open to any transaction that delivers full value to our stockholders – we just do not believe such a transaction should be dictated by Microsoft and a single short-term investor…"

…After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a ‘take it or leave it’ proposal under which we would be required to restructure the Company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!’s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the Company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our Board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders”

In business speak that translates to; ‘Are you out of your *&$%@#^mind? Look we were never together. I’m with Google now, ok? You need to move on. Go buy Apple or something’

In the press release Yahoo! references its new deal with Google and refers to it as having ‘superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal’

This doesn’t mean the dance is over yet. Later in the press release Yahoo! states that it ready to sell to Microsoft for the original $33 but Microsoft balked at that deal. I’m not certain but the recent deal with Google’s AdWords, that has come under scrutiny, might have something to do with it.

Whatever happens this sure has been fun to watch, sort of like Desperate Housewives for search nerds

Stay Tuned next week as Steve Balmer cuts the break lines on Jerry Yang’s Mercedes – that is a total falsehood but would make for a good movie though, wouldn’t it?

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

The Webinar will go over some of these topics:

1. Minimum pricing update
2. Update on interface
3. Best practices to use
4. General Yahoo! account questions people have asked

You can find the achieved webinar here: 

https://www.meeting.corp.yahoo.com/p31795888/ 

This Webinar is about an hour long.

You can also visit the Yahoo! Search Engine Marketing Blog for the most updated information.

Annisa Chan

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Microsoft announced over the weekend that it is withdrawing its bid to acquire Yahoo ending its 3 month dance with the second most popular search engine. In a letter released on PR Newswire CEO Steve Ballmer cites Yahoo’s AdWord deal with Google as a factor for the deal falling through.

Ballmer states that Yahoo ‘pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to
the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms… …would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable.’

Ballmer goes on to give reasons such as; ‘it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google’ over its own Ad serving technology.’

I don’t think this is the end of the courtship though, it could be Microsoft’s way of devaluing Yahoo’s stock in an effort to take them over at a later, less expensive, date.

Where does that leave us?

Who knows. Maybe Google and Yahoo form another company and try to buy Microsoft, now that would be funny

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

And so continues the ongoing saga of the search engines. For those keeping score at home that puts the Yahoo price anywhere between 45.5 to 47 billion and that really is chump change isn’t it? Is there anyway that that could have a trickle down effect for those of us that advertise on both Microsoft and Yahoo’s ad platform? That brings up a good question, once this takeover is finished with will we have ONE interface at which to edit our campaigns for both MSN & Yahoo? No official word yet.

One thing we do know is Microsoft has it’s check book open and their pen is cocked

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com