For many advertisers, Yahoo Gemini is a 3rd tier advertising network. Google is the obvious 800-lb. gorilla and is getting a strong challenge from Facebook and Amazon (I could write whole posts about that). Bing is the scrappy challenger to Google who has managed to piece together over 20% of search market share in the US (current stats put Microsoft Sites at 24% as of April this year).
However, looking at those same stats we see that Oath (the new name for Yahoo after they were purchased by Verizon recently) has 11.4% of the US search market. That adds up to over 1/3rd of the US search market outside of Google.
I recently spoke with a small startup that has a monthly Google Ads budget of several thousand dollars but had yet to pursue Bing or Yahoo. But do the numbers hold up in real life? I’ll give you some real numbers from a client of mine where we’ve pursued Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Breaking Down Search Channels By the Numbers
I’ll use spend and return on ad spend (ROAS) as the metrics. A case could be made to look at clicks or impressions, but I think this is fair enough:
- Google – 82.4% of search budget
- Bing – 14.3% of search budget
- Yahoo – 3.3% of search budget
So these numbers aren’t as high, but this advertiser would be leaving nearly 18% of their potential search volume on the table if they didn’t cover these networks (which you can directly import from Google Ads anyway).
The story gets more compelling when you look at return:
- Google – 10.82X return
- Bing – 9.85X return
- Yahoo – 12.31X return
Not only would this advertiser lose out on nearly 18% of searches, but every dollar spent on these networks is highly efficient. For Yahoo, they make over $12 for every dollar they spend on PPC.
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you to expand your view to include Yahoo, but if not here’s another consideration.
Recent Update: Yahoo Gemini Enhances Change History
Logging into Yahoo Gemini I was greeted by the following popup:
Before advertisers were very limited in what they could see in the change history. It was really high-level stuff like “Bid changed” that didn’t really help get you the context you needed. However, with this change, you can now drill down on each individual change to see what it was before the change and what it was changed to. This is very helpful for auditing performance changes, reporting, and keeping tabs on what optimizations have and haven’t been made.
So have you tried Yahoo Gemini? Why or why not? Would love to hear some discussion in the comments.
