Taking Another Look At Bing And Yahoo

Although most articles about Internet advertising politely discuss three major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, the reality has been that if you are not focused on Google, you are nowhere.

Even with Microsoft's new decision engine, Bing, which is slowly making some inroads against Google, there is still a huge mountain to climb. The research group Global Stat Counter released the following market share information about the top three search engines for June and July 2009:

In the United States, Microsoft and Yahoo! combined took 20.36percent of the market, up slightly from 19.27percent in June. Google still commands the US market with 77.54percent in July (78.48percent in June).

In the global marketplace, Microsoft and Yahoo! combined took 8.77percent of the global search market in July (8.45percent in June). Google still dominates the search market globally with 89.23percent in July (89.80percent in June).

But, Microsoft and Yahoo have not given in to Google crushing presence in this space. These two major players have joined forces with a special arrangement with respect to advertising activity.

Under terms of the partnership arrangement, Microsoft will provide the search engine for all Yahoo sites and sell self-service keywords through its AdCenter, while Yahoo will handle ad sales for both companies 'premium,' or larger, advertisers.

They hope to carve out a solid competitive place against Google by playing to each company's strengths and removing the need to compete with each other.

What does this mean for online retailers?

The competition may make pricing for pay per click ads a bit less expensive now that there is really a viable option to consider. On the one hand, reducing the number of players reduces the competition, which typically drives prices up.

However, in this case, because neither Microsoft nor Yahoo provides much real competition for Google, the combined group actually has the clout to be competitive for the first time. Plus, if you were dividing some of your advertising dollars between Microsoft and Yahoo, you can now merge those dollars so they can go further.

Take a better look at Bing for advertising. Bing decision engine is gaining in popularity, albeit in very small increments. Bing strategy is to focus on several arenas at a time with its decision engine methodology.

It has begun by focusing on four search reasons: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. Since Bing is focusing on retail purchasing, it is worth trying it out with some advertising to see if you get new or different visitors and/or if Bing provides referrals that generate a higher conversion rate.

You should also take a look at how your site is doing in terms of organic ratings on Bing to be sure that you have the bases covered. According to the website Misc DOT info, Bing search engine algorithm relies on these factors:

Title of Page
META Description
Text in the Links to the Page
Number of Links to the Page
Page Theme/Keyword Density
Freshness of Page Content

The same site compares Bing algorithms to Yahoo and Google as well.