Is Facebook the new Google? Can Microsoft Content Ads catch Google Adsense? Why you should use all three search engines?
All pertinent questions raised here today in California at Search Engine Strategies.
Read on if you want some answers from our US brethren!
At a session on the search landscape in the US we learned that Google, although hugely dominant, has just 50%-odd of market share rather than the 70+% share they enjoy in many countries in Europe. Yahoo! accounts for about 20% and Microsoft just above 10% depending on whose metrics you go for.
Bill Tancer from Hitwise asked the question about Facebook and Google, fielding the notion that social networking will continue to have a greater influence on pushing answers, data and information to users than the “serendipitous” nature of arriving at answers via search engines.
Why you should plan your ad buy across all three main search engines was spelled out well by Jeremy Crane from Compete.com, who shared a little research they recently conducted.
In July 07 they aggregated searches on airline type terms, and discovered 85% of Google users only used Google for this type of search, 75% of Yahoo! users only used Yahoo! and 66% of MSN/Live users only used MSN/Live.
With a 51/34/14 split of share in that vertical (G/Y/M), it’s compelling evidence that, although Google may be the biggest player, marketers are losing out on swathes of audience if they don’t run search activity on Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter.
Contextual advertising had another surprise today when my colleagues from Microsoft in the US announced the full launch of the Content Ads Beta in the US next week on the 29th August.
In the same session, I was very impressed by Google’s Product Marketing Manager for AdSense – Gopi Kallayil.
Without a presentation, he just stood and talked for 12 minutes on why contextual advertising is a viable option for advertisers wanting to reach consumers in the browsing stage of the buying cycle, and how the medium can also throw up surprising ways to educate users as to new products and services that they may not know existed.
He used the example of Bird Diapers appearing alongside pet related content, which has to go down as one of the most bizarre point-illustrations I’ve yet to see at a conference - but a very powerful one nonetheless!
