Yahoo! launches search marketing tool in India

Cashing in on the Internet and search marketing boom in India is new entrant Yahoo!, with its newly launched Yahoo! Search Marketing for Indian marketers and consumers. Yahoo! Search Marketing is present in 23 other countries and, this year, the company has plans to launch it in several other places. 

This new offering from Yahoo! will help marketers to connect with consumers through the ‘Sponsored Search’, which will enable marketers to bid for highly visible placements on the web pages of Yahoo! and its other network websites (Yahoo! Partner Network) such as msn, cnn.com, etc., which will appear as a result of the key words searched for by the user. This again will depend on the number of keywords the marketer buys from Yahoo!  

Another model that Yahoo! Search Marketing will provide is called ‘Content Match’, along with its partner networks, which will facilitate the placement of listings on content sites, newsletters, blogs and online publications, driving more traffic to a marketer’s site. 

Yahoo! is extremely optimistic about the success of this venture in India courtesy the overwhelming statistics of Internet users in India. Reports suggest that there are 21-22 million Internet users in India and the number of users who use ‘search’ is also on the rise. According to Sandeep Deshpande, general manager, Yahoo! Search Marketing, the opportunity in this business is huge.  

“There are about one billion Internet users in the world. One out of every sixth person uses the Internet some time in the day and six out of 10 use ‘search’,” Deshpande says. By 2010, the number of search users may escalate to 33 billion worldwide.

Moreover, for marketers, ‘search marketing’ is a very cost-effective and measurable, hence efficient, means of online advertising. Many marketers have begun considering it an effective and reliable part of the online mix today. 

About launching in a nascent market like India, Craig Wax, regional managing director, Yahoo! Search Marketing, says that it is of strategic importance to Yahoo! because of the increasing Internet consumption here. “Yahoo! Search Marketing can now serve businesses of all sizes, be it branded advertisers or small entrepreneurs, easily and effectively and reach the huge consumer base in India.” 

Yahoo! Search Marketing will implement certain additional benefits such as account expertise, which will render expert advice from a special team, editorial consultation and search term maximisation assistance in order to identify additional search terms for better results.  

Apart from these, Yahoo! Search Marketing will also focus on aspects such as using a ‘high touch model’, under which account management will be provided for large advertisers, delivering high ROIs for advertisers and educating small and medium businesses about the benefits of search marketing. It will also ensure that an advertiser does not bid on a competitor’s keywords.  

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