Search engine marketing options

Yahoo! Search Marketing had a strong presence at the SOHO-SME Conference last week held in downtown Vancouver. Along with delivering the breakfast keynote, they had a large presence at the tradeshow along with delivering a short workshop on Search Engine Marketing 101.

Yahoo! Originally began offering the service after acquiring Overture Services Inc. (formerly Goto.com) for $1.7 billion, and now competes directly with Google Ad Words, a similar service which we have been using. While no one is disputing that Google is the #1 search engine (unofficial figures provided by Yahoo! cite that in Canada, Google owns 75% of internet searches while Yahoo! comes in at 15% followed by MSN at 10%). Yahoo!’s main point that they were trying to drive home was time spent. According to their reaserach, they find that users spend on average, 8 minutes on their search engine, while Google users spend 2 minutes on average. I’m not sure the exact parameters on which this is measured, but it would make sense if you consider that their home page is much more of a portal compared with Google’s homepage.

While Google’s market share makes it the obvious choice, I'm thinking there would be much to lose to split up some of the pie that is your online advertising budget and try out some other services. You always hear about diversifying your portfolio, right? After all, the risk would be low – with the pay-per-click model, you only pay of your online ad is actually clicked through.