When a business plans to launch a search engine marketing campaign, it usually targets three search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing . No surprises here because these search engines have a long history and proven track records. However, as Yahoo plans to outsource its search engine to Bing, we will soon be left with two major search engines – Google and Bing. This has caused search marketing companies to look beyond the big two for pay per click advertising.

The giants rule Search Marketing 

Many small search engines have entered the market with claims of being better than Google. However, they have never met up to standards or gained popularity. Google is the defacto standard for web search around the globe. It has over 70% share in the market and is still growing.  It is no wonder that in spite of high prices, search engine marketing firms prefer to tie up with Google than any other search engine.

Smaller search engines try to compete with the giants by launching different search algorithms and methodologies. Mahalo uses human editors. Like.com uses visual search. Some other search engines gaining popularity are Ask.com, cull, baidu, etc. However, they have not been able to capture crticial user adoption to make it attractive for pay per click advertising.

Vertical Search optimizes Search Marketing

A concept gaining popularity amongst search marketers  is “vertical search”. Vertical search can dramatically increase the effectiveness of a pay per click advertising campaign as compared with the broad-based searches conducted on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Vertical search means that the search engine searches only specific types of searches rather than the entire Web. Some examples of vertical search engines are TradeSeam, Kayak, MedStory, Pricegrabber, DentaProducts.net, Indeed etc.

Search Marketers should target niche markets

Google and Bing have a broad-based scope when it comes to web search. The internet is growing every day and web search results are often at variance with the search topic. Vertical search engines that target niche markets can help businesses get more value out of search marketing.

The web content may soon reach unmanageable levels even for the major search engine giants. When that day arrives, pay per click marketing companies that have vertical search engine domain expertise will have a compettive advantage over their counterparts.

Lower Cost of Acquisition

Google started by offering  pay per click ads for 1 US cent. As it grew, so did the cost of search advertising on its search engine network. If a vertical search engine is performing well, businesses should consider using it to lower the cost per acquisition of its overall marketing spend to drive a higher return on investment (ROI)

Alhough the search advertising market is ruled by the big two  - Google and Bing - businesses should test and allocate the performance of vertical search engines. Vertical search engines may have less traffic than the big two but their search algorithms are geared towards a specific industry that can result in much better returns for your pay per click search marketing  budget.

Tags: pay per click

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