Everyone knows about keyword search advertising.  It is the largest form of paid advertising online. For instance, if you’re a website designer you want your ad to show up when people use Google for example and their searching for website design among the other ads. If your ad is not optimized correctly and you’re getting a bad click through rate then Google will penalize you and drive up your cost per click.

Think of it like this. If you were offering advertising space and you only get paid when someone clicks on the ad would you want an ad up there that is not getting any clicks?  Of course not. This is why Google can be good or bad for your keyword search advertising campaign. If you fully optimize your ad campaign so that your keywords match your ad then you will get more clicks because your ad says specifically (to a degree) what the person typed in the search bar. If your keywords do not match your ad and Google gives you a bad history you can end up with inactive keywords where you must bid at least $5 to $10 per click. Google recognizes when people or businesses pay attention to their ad campaign and optimize them to receive better results. When you are getting a high impressions to click through ratio Google may only charge you .30 per click. Google would rather charge you 10 times at $.30 per click than 1 time at $2 per click. A fully optimized ad campaign saves you time and money on your advertising.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN control over 90% of the search market. Google taking an average of 59%, Yahoo at about 27%, and MSN at an average of 7% don’t leave much for the other search engines. Pricing for advertising with these search engine giants is similar to the traffic they receive. You will find that it is more expensive to advertise with Google than it is Yahoo, and more expensive to advertise with Yahoo than it is MSN. Here are the totals for Keyword Search Advertising

Google 59%, Yahoo 27%, MSN 7%

MSN (Bing.com) and Yahoo recently merged.  I will be discussing this further in this section of the blog.

BING AND YAHOO MERGE

Bing and Yahoo merged and the founder of search walked away.  Politics or just the want to catch up with Google? Which one is it?  I’m encouraging all viewers of this post to interact and share their knowledge.  In my opinion you cannot beat Google.  They have just done too much and created too many good products and for free at that.  Everyone else tries to copy and mimic them while they strive for the unknown.  Google Wave is a new product that I like quite a bit personally.  I’ve been using it for a week and I love the simplicity and organization.  The only downfall is that I cannot use it with everyone cause Google has limited the amount of users.  I will probably be moving this post over to a new section in our blog soon.  We will be adding another section soon.

Thanks and I look forward to discussing this with those that want to discuss.