Yahoo Is Such a Copycat

Is it just me, or does Yahoo just seem to be copying everything Google does these days?

Here are some examples of things Yahoo has been copying in the online marketing world:

1. Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) has copied Google's terminology for the structure of its advertising campaigns
2. It is adding quality score functionality
3. It is making available its own equivalent of Google Analytics
   
4. It is going to be limiting ad descriptions to 70 characters (the same as AdWords 2 x 35 character limit fields)
   
5. And now, it has announced that PayPal buttons are going to appear on it's sponsored search listings in just the same way that Google Checkout buttons appear alongside AdWords ads.

Come on Yahoo!, how about doing something original!

Tags: yahoo, google, ysm

comScore December U.S. Search Engine Rankings

comScore has just released it's December U.S. Search Engine Ranking figures. The main points of interest are:

1. The total number of U.S. searches in December was 6.7 billion
   
2. Google sites increased by 0.4% since November, up from 46.9% to 47.3%
3. Yahoo sites increased by 0.3% since November, up from 28.2% to 28.5%
4. Microsoft, Ask and Time Warner sites all went down, with the biggest drop being for Microsoft, which dropped 0.5%, from 11.0% to 10.5%.

Thus, it seems Microsoft's efforts to be a serious player in the search engine world are just not working.

Some other interesting stats:

• In December, Americans carried out 1,195 Google searches per second! That's the equivalent of 1 search every 0.00084 seconds (approximately!) .
  
• In December, Americans carried out 709 Yahoo searches per second, which is 1 search every 0.0014 seconds.
• In December, Americans carried out a mere 266 Microsoft/MSN searches per second, or 1 search every 0.0038 seconds
• In comparison, McDonald's serves approximately 544 customers worldwide per second, that's 1 customer every 0.00184 seconds.
  

At the time of writing, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the U.S. population at 300,981,361. Thus, for December:

• On average, each and every U.S. citizen did roughly 10.6 searches on Google
• On average, each U.S. citizen seached on Google every 70 hours.

Technorati Tags: comscore, google, yahoo, search engines

Yahoo Search Marketing's New Advertising Platform

Yahoo is just beginning to roll out its new advertising platform to U.S. advertisers with, presumably, the rollout extending to non-U.S. advertisers next year. As part of the new platform Yahoo is introducing some terminology changes:

"Categories" is becoming "Campaigns" and "Listings" is becoming divided into "Ads" & "Ad Groups."

Then, of course, we still have "keywords."

So, campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords - that terminology sounds very familiar. Hopefully that will makes things easier for the unhappy AdWords advertisers switching over to YSM!

Technorati Tags: YSM, Yahoo