Now that the Yahoo – Google deal has been done, how does this affect your Search strategy? Is it better or worse? For Yahoo it’s good, for you as the advertiser, it limits your choices on pricing for Search, which is bad.
Now, that Google will be serving their search ads on Yahoo, that limits the amount of advertising choices, which ultimately means that Search pricing for your keywords are going to go up. Also, the advertiser will have to deal with higher online search budgets, since it won’t be offset, by running ads on Yahoo and Google separately. Traditionally Yahoo’s keyword search term pricing has been lower than Google’s, so now that Google will be running the show, there will be no choices to separate the Search campaigns in other platforms for reducing pricing. So, what about MSN?
MSN’s search has been no match for Yahoo or Google in the past, but maybe with this new partnership deal, will step up MSN’s effort to be a real player in Search and as an alternative for online advertisers. We will have to wait and see.