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Yahoo Microsoft Merger Effect For Small Business

Tags: Yahoo Microsoft Merger, Yahoo MSN Merger, Yahoo Bing Merger

What Does the Yahoo Microsoft Merger Mean for Small Business?

Yahoo! and Microsoft have received regulatory clearance to form a search alliance called Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This Yahoo Microsoft Merger means  Microsoft who run MSN/Bing will merge with Yahoo! search to form one search enging and search marketing service.

Our concern at Make Your Own Website Easy.com of this alliance is that it reads more like a Microsoft takeover that will disadvantage small business owners and solo internet marketers in favour of the big corporate advertisers.

The merger should be renamed the Microsoft take over! Why? Because according to the Yahoo! release “you'll log into one place – Microsoft's adCenter – to manage campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better ROI.” Yahoo seems to be gobbled up in this alliance, perhaps only being used for its search capability. What this could mean to small businesses using Yahoo Search Marketing is you could be paying more per click to advertise on this new alliance once it comes in to effect toward the end of the year.

We use both MSN (Bing) and Yahoo! search marketing over a number of websites within several industries. We have consistently found that MSN sends more less traffic for more cost per click than our Yahoo! campaigns for the exact same keywords and industry.

The 62% more search volume MSN claims to be offering to this alliance has not been experienced with us. For example, over 7 of our campaigns with MSN we paid top dollar, approximately 60% more per click than with Yahoo! Now paying top dollar and MSN having over 150 million searches, we would reasonably expect to get a good trickle of traffic from our campaigns. Not so. 3 a month on one highly searched set of keywords. 5 per month on another large volume topic search.

The exact same campaigns and ads on Yahoo would give us approximately 10-40 clicks per day and they have fewer searchers.

Now that advertisers will be login in to the Microsoft adCenter for admin of pay per click advertising in both Yahoo and Bing, it could possibly mean that you’ll pay 60% more for your clicks to reach that 62% more . We have run several campaigns on MSN and paid top dollar only to receive 1 or two clicks a day. A similar campaign in Yahoo will cost us approximately a third less and send 10-40 clicks a day.

Once the alliance has formed what will the new cost per click hierarchy look like? Will they all default to Microsoft? This could severely disadvantage those small businesses using Yahoo! Search Marketing and not MSN.
So is this new alliance a good thing for small business owners and entrepreneurs or will it favour the bigger advertisers with the big budget?

We’ll keep you posted on our results and queries of this Yahoo Microsoft Merger our newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for it yet head on over to the home page of our website and fill out the form.