Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

SEM in the travel space is not easy. We know, as here at LeadQual we have a number of travel related clients serving different parts of the world. To help all those who struggle and work hard in this space, I wanted to share some data from a ComScore study of 50,000 UK web users. This study focused on user behavior and trends for the online travel industry. Some note worthy facts.

“I like to take my time to buy”

• 15.9% of purchasers buy holiday travel items from the first site they visit
• But only 1.6% will buy in their first session
• This means 14.3% will return at a later time!
• Most users will visit your site at least twice before transacting
• On average it takes 29 days for a transaction to occur for a holiday user
• 30% of transaction occur more than 6 weeks after initial search!

Note: Check delayed conversion especially on Google accounts. Re-pull old reports and update your conversion information. Note that Google’s cookie is only 30 days, so check your backend data to determine if the value of the clicks you are paying for are worth more than it has.

“If I remember your name, I’ll be back”

• 35% of Transactions occur without a keyword search
• Almost 50% of travel searches are brand keyterms (names of companies)

Note: Branding is huge! Good URL is crucial. Bidding on Brand even more crucial!A user may come in and see your PPC ad, but end up not making a decision right away. When they are ready, if your URL is memorable and easy, they’ll just type that in the browser and purchase.
(more…)

Yesterday, Yahoo announced the rebranding of IndexTools into Yahoo Web Analytics. It is currently in beta and only available as an enterprise product. IndexTool was acquired by Yahoo in April 2008. Yahoo immediately started to work on integrating the tool in a similar fashion to the well known Google Analytics. The service was made free with the distinct advantage of having data updated every few minutes.
(more…)

News Corp owned Fox Interactive Media (FIM), which owns social MySpace, has surpassed Yahoo! as the owner of the largest share of display advertising in the US according to comScore data.

In June, total display ad views on FIM sites was over 56.8 million views which makes up 15.9% of all display advertising in the US. Yahoo! sites served up 53.1 billion display ads in the same month for a 14.2% share. Top display advertisers on FIM include University of Phoenix & Deutsche Telekom while the top Yahoo! display advertisers are Netflix & Nextag.

Concerns at Yahoo?
This new data shows a change from May when Yahoo had 15.9% share and FIM had a 13.5% share. With Yahoo!’s stocks dipping below $20, there has been many concerns regarding whether Yahoo! will be able to maintain or grow their advertising business. Yahoo! has been under much pressure to show shareholders that their advertising business will continue to grow and remain strong after turning away a $47.5 billion offer from Microsoft.

Good News MySpace
FIM’s growth in the advertising business is good news for their social networking property MySpace which makes up nearly all of FIM’s display advertising revenue. However there continues to be a struggle for advertisers to generate revenue off of social networking sites as these ad medium has generally had a poorer conversion rate compared to other online marketing tactics.

MySpace has reported that their fiscal fourth quarter revenue grew 23% year to year to $225 million due to search and advertising gains. They also noted that their ability to “hyper target” in delivering ads to specific group of consumers has contributed to this growth.

Display Advertising
Forrester projects that $2.78 billion will be spent by retailers this year. That would make display advertising over a third of all online marketing which is projected to be $8.2 billion according to Forrester. Search Engine marketing makes up $3.63 billion and email marketing is third at $1.25 billion.

AOL, Microsoft & Google sites round out the top 5 display advertisers in terms of total market share followed by well known web properties Facebook & Ebay.

Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 5.5 billion display ad views (1.7% share) largely due to its promotional campaign for Live Search. The University of Phoenix, an online university came in second with 4.7 billion ad views (1.4%) followed by Experian Interactive, United Airlines, Verizon, and AT&T all at 3.8-3.9 billion ad views (1.2%).

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Source: Nielsen Online

Google continues to grow both in searches in and in market share. In July Google’s searches increased 16% over last year. Yahoo’s searches decreased 11 percent while Microsoft searches dropped 10%. Ask.com which has shifted its focus to targeting soccer moms and women grew 13% for 2% of the market share. Microsoft however had made a lot of gains in the past few months by providing monetary incentives to searchers for using their live.com search engine. It has brought many users to their site and increased their market share.

However Google owns 60 percent of the 8 billion searches and continues to own this market by a large lead. The industry as a total increased 3 percent in terms of total searches.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

There is a lot of talk going around that Yahoo! will soon reveal it’s new display ad management system. This platform was formerly known as “Amp” and is expected to help them increase their revenue and growth projection. This new management system should start to rollout this quarter.

Yahoo! has been working to build itself as a management system that would easily enable to advertisers, publishers, and agencies to buy and sell hundreds of relevant ad space without the need of speaking to a Yahoo rep on the phone. Best of all this system is expected to be free unlike many of their ad management software competitors. One unique aspect about this new management system is that it would enable publishing partners to sell inventory on Yahoo! properties. “Inside of the company, the reason the confidence level is so high is we’re not just building a piece of software to be innovative. We are potentially the biggest customer of the software” said Mike Walrath, senior vice president of Yahoo!’s advertiser marketplace.” Word is that the initial feedback from partners have been very positive.

Google with its acquisition of DoubleClick is expected to release of integrated features in the near future. DoubleClick current is a paid management system.

This system was supposed to be released earlier, but was delayed when the Adam Hyder, the head of engineering for this project left for a different company.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing