South West eCommerce

Microsoft and Yahoo recently announced a partnership deal which signifies an important change in the search engine market.

Basically the deal is that Microsoft is going to become the technology provider for search results for both Microsoft and Yahoo.

One of the problems in the past for businesses that advertise in search results (eg. Pay Per Click advertising) is that Google’s dominance of the market means that advertising in Yahoo or Microsoft has often not provided enough return to warrant the effort in setting up campaigns, simply because the level of traffic is too low.

What this new partnership may mean is that advertisers will be able to set up one advertising account which will feed both Yahoo and Microsoft search sites (and related partner sites). The end result is that advertisers may have less accounts to worry about, and Google will have a much stronger competitor, which has to be a good thing. However, it remains to be seen whether removing an engine out of the market will also reduce competition.

Given that this deal is likely to take 6 months to obtain regulatory approval, and then probably another 2 years to be fully implemented, there is of course no immediate action to take in relation to search engine campaigns. However, it is a development we will continue to update you on as it progresses, to keep you informed of any changes you may need to make to your search engine marketing efforts.