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JCPenney's Ron Johnson: 'Customers Don't Get Our Pricing Strategy'The long-anticipated search engine ad wars officially start today. The announcement will be made by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer during his address to the company's Strategic Account Summit.
Yahoo! search marketing ads will no longer appear on MSN or other Microsoft web properties. That's no big surprise. Microsoft's been weaning itself of Yahoo!'s ads for a while now. The only thing new is the final date it will happen.
Advertisers who have been part of the test like the features of Microsoft's AdCenter, but don't like the traffic numbers. So AdCenter's only chance of success will come when Microsoft can increase the traffic to its web sites. AdCenter's unique features include the ability to pick the day of week, time of day, and geographic location for the ad being placed. AdCenter can also help advertisers target searches based on age, gender and income. Yahoo! and Google ad search engines can't do that.
While eventually these extra features might help Microsoft win the war, it won't have a chance of success until it increases the traffic to its Web sites dramatically. Right now Microsoft only gets 11% of that traffic with Google getting the lion's share of 49% and Yahoo getting 23%, according to Neilson/Net Ratings.
George Kepnick of search ad agency Dottedonline.com told Bloomberg that most companies put 70% of their search engine ad budgets into Google. Only 20% goes to Yahoo and MSN gets the remaining 10%.
Can Microsoft turn that around?
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's new ad czar certainly hopes so. He's the new king of advertising for Microsoft. He'll be leading the charge for the upcoming ad battles with Google and Yahoo!.
He'll also be concentrating on persuading executives in the company to look for ways to add advertising to all of Microsoft's products. Last week I reported on Microsoft's purchase of Massive, Inc., which places ads in video games. That's just another piece of the arsenal for the coming ad wars.
Let the wars begin!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-04-2006 @ 11:12PM
Ashok Adusumilli said...
I guess after organic search, the buzzword now is demographic targeted search, Msn definitely has an advantage here, (so does yahoo), with its millions of hotmail/passport users, msn has a bigger base of the search users as compared to google's gmailers who are still small in number. Google definitely needs to do something regarding this, coz msn & yahoo are going to leverage this.
This is where the $1B investment in AOL may pay off for google. If google can get AOL's users, they may be get a big chunk of users with available data.
Also, with MSN & Yahoo announcing interoperability on their IM platforms, Google's nonexistent, highly lacking Hello/Talk needs to be overhauled (Futile?), instead google can get all of AOL's AIM users via an AOL merger. I feel IM will play a big part in advertising in the coming future.
The war has just begun, google better step up and start moving faster now.