Do you bother with Yahoo and MSN?

Hi mate, there is no doubt that Google delivers the volume. However that also means that everybody and their Aunty uses AdWords for PPC campaigns and the costs sky rocket. Because of this a lot of people overlook both MSN and Yahoo! and you can therefore grab some real “bargains” in terms of cheap keywords. For example I have quite a few PPC campaigns running on both these smaller engines that deliver huge returns (1000%+) and although the volume isn’t huge it’s still certainly worth the effort.

While Yahoo! and MSN generally provide less traffic - all traffic is worth considering.

In SERP terms, a top 10 result on Yahoo! is probably going to get you more traffic than a 3rd or 4th page on Google. Thats not to say its any easier to get on the first page of results on Yahoo! or MSN, but its worth monitoring and knowing what changes you make to your site will affect your positions in the major search engines.

Paid search is also generally much cheaper on those search engines, and its users less savvy, not to mention the risk that you run by putting ‘all your eggs in one basket’, since the particular basket in question is renowned for moving the goalposts regularly.

Ah yes. I remember that. Will didn’t twist my words or anything but in that phone chat I discussed both sides of the debate and only one half of that debate made the cut.

If you add in agency costs (time) into costs then as long as Yahoo still has an ROI (or brand, or CPA, or any other KPI that matters for the account) that you’re happy with then Yahoo’s still working for you.

A tough question is always; if I can get an ROI of 10:1 at Google and 9:1 at Yahoo… and I can spend all my money at Google, should I bother with Yahoo?

Personally I only optimize one way…the right way..lol. Good meta-tags and on site content. I also try to add content daily if possible. So I would have to say that I don’t optimize for any particular engine, although I think site should focus on getting ranked in Google obviously…Thanks!

Kieron - I agree that there are definitely some opportunities and I’ve benefited myself but on a current larger campaign I’m finding it’s probably not worth the hassle of updating ads/monitoring performance etc across them all.

But I guess it’s just a case of testing the water on them all as I’m sure it’s great for some campaigns and not for others.

Marc - it’s definitely worth considering all traffic if it’s easy to do but the potential time spent on a campaign needs to be paid back as well. Avoiding “all the eggs in one basket” is a useful reminder!

Andrew - Sorry I realise that by lifting one even smaller quote I probably took that further out of context but your ratio question hits the nail on the head. Then if you decide not to bother with Yahoo you wouldn’t need to suffer the terrible interface

Evan - I think you make a good point about not worrying too much about optimizing and worrying more about good regular content.

Thanks for all the comments so far.

I am not sure where the nma get their stats from, unless they are old ones. I have seen a big rise in organic traffic from yahoo. Some of my sites get most of the traffic from yahoo. Its funny how sometimes a keyword wont rank in google but will rank well in yahoo.

Regarding paid search I stopped using yahoo, simply, because they make it too complicated to use, the paid results are not that good either.
As quality paid traffic, I think msn beats gog and yahoo. They have simplified the msn ads, but is still longer than it should take. Deleting a keyword can be a pain as well.
But overall the returns on msn/goog, puts msn ahead