Changes to the pay-per-click advertising market

The pay-per-click advertising market looks set to change over the next year with announcements from both Yahoo and MSN over the last month.

Yahoo has announced that it will be renaming the Overture service (which it purchased in 2003) as Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions over the next few months. However, this is largely a branding change and the service being offered looks set to stay much the same in the near future.

MSN, as expected, have just announced they will begin offering their own pay-per-click advertising service, possibly within the next 18 months in the UK. It will be tested within 6 months in France and Singapore in the first instance and then rolled out to other markets after this. Currently MSN use adverts supplied by Overture and have a contract for this to continue until June 2006.

The most innovative feature of the new MSN PPC service that was announced will be the opportunity to target different geographic locations and demographic groups by using information gained from users’ profiles on the widely used Hotmail and MSN Messenger services.

Effectively this will eventually mean that most major advertisers will need to use Google Ads (AdWords), Overture and MSN to ensure best coverage of the UK market, especially if MSN’s share increases. This will mean increased management time required for a business operate all three accounts successfully, but hopefully we should see improving service levels as competition between these three providers increases.

If you want to find out more about using pay-per-click advertising to support your online business, please contact us for more information.

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