Yahoo in B2B decline

[dburdon]

I'm involved in managing 8 business to business campaigns. In doing so I had an early preference for Yahoo over MSN or Google.

MSN seems biased towards young consumers. Google, because of its academic roots and "do no evil" philosophy seemed to produce SERPs that were (relatively) biased against traditional business websites.

See the example for the term "Fulfilment".

"Fulfilment" on Google.co.uk

"fulfilment" on UK.Yahoo.com

The problem is, that as Hitwise has recently reported, Google's UK market share is about to break through the 75% barrier. Squeezing MSN and Yahoo into ever smaller territory with about 7.5% market share each. As a search engine marketer involved in B2B my observation is that the switch to Google has been even more severe.

12 months ago Yahoo regularly achieved 15%-20% of my B2B clients' traffic. Today that share ranges from 1% to 6%. That is, it is below the share Hitwise
says they have in the general market.

Does this mean that corporate web users have flooded out of Yahoo? To my mind, as the example above shows, Yahoo provides a superior product when it comes to relevancy in many corporate categories.

[ctabuk]

David - I must be thick today, are you asking if corporations are no longer optimising/being picked up by Yahoo or are you simply saying, look guys and gals Yahoo is dead? In which case I would agree, Yahoo is a great SE in some directions, but it's as dead as a dodo when it comes to site traffic.

[dburdon]

CTABUK,

my observations are that the traffic generated by my B2B clients' websites is decreasingly from Yahoo. This despite the fact that B2B is one area where I believe Yahoo provides more relevant search results than Google.

According to the latest figures from Hitwise, Google now dominates the UK search market with a 75% share. Yahoo has 7.5%. So, on average, with all other things being equal, for every 10 Google delivered searches the sites should get 1 Yahoo derived search.

This is simply not the case right now. Its varying between a ratio of at best 13:1 to a worst of 40:1 in favour of Google.

A broader concern is that the more dominant Google becomes the less inclined they will be to respond to wider issues such as click fraud.

[ctabuk]

Thank you David

[Irishjim]

You lads seem to have this under control but it seems to have become an all-Brit forum so I'll chime in if you don't mind.

I have no answer for this astute observation but I'm wondering if Google's slow lag time for adding relevancy to their searches in regards to new content is having a weighted effect on corporations.

Perhaps they are sifting through the mix to pick up sites that are more static in nature, i.e. staid companies who are slow to add content and this is having a beneficial influence on your B2B results.

It's been a long day so forgive me if this is vague... tis only a reflection of my mind.

[ozzie_jim]

David you're spot on. I achieved #1 for a number of my keywords in Yahoo but where's the traffic? Unfortunately it all comes from my expensive adwords targeting. Sigh.

My ratio is about 30:1 for similar ranked keywords in Google and Yahoo.

[Orion]

A bit of a Canadian perspective eh!

I've noticed this on a few sites. I'll use my site specifically:

Google sends more traffic than Yahoo! about 8 to 1. We rank from 3 to 18 points higher (depending on the keyword phrase) in Yahoo! over Google.

Here's the clincher and why I haven't bothered worring about our slight slip in google...

Of all the visitors we get 99% of our sales are from Yahoo! MSN, less than 1% are the result of Google traffic. It's about a 60-40 70-30 range from month to month between Yahoo! and MSN respectively.

I think that we also get a better volume of traffic in Canada from Yahoo! and MSN than other locations due to the two largest ISPs (Rogers and Bell Canada) having relationships with each. Rogers Yahoo! and Sympatico MSN. if you use these ISPs (they have about 60% of the market I've read) your home page has the search engine integrated into it.

This has also happened to our clients in US and Japan.

So basically, when google started messing around about 6months ago.. two things happened to most of our client's sites:
1. Google traffic went up but became less relevant.
2. Yahoo MSN traffic locked in (no real noticable increase though) and closed sales went up.

Go figure! Though we have a few complaints on Google rankings dropping a few points here and there.. my response mostly is .. are sales up? YES. Are Google results more or less relevant? LESS. Don't worry about it, focus our attention where we're getting more money into the bottom line for the clients.

We'll worry more about Google when their results become more relevant (a year ago they weren't bad actually).

... go figure eh!

[MacTheKnife]

Very interested to see Yahoo supplying such great results for Orion.

However, like David (and Jim) we see the ratio of traffic from Yahoo and MSN diminishing and that from Google increasing.

It is a pity when a better product gets squeezed out, e.g. Betamax v VHS (and probably Blu-ray v HD-DVD!).

Now that Google has such a devastating SE market share I wonder how business-to-business directories fare in the mix. Purely thinking of corporate users, could more sophisticated b2b directories score highly for relevancy?

[dburdon]

I note MactheKnife's views regarding better products being squeezed out of markets. Mac quotes Betamax vs. VHS and Blu-Ray versus HD as examples.

Economist John Kay has just written a piece on the exact subject, quoting both examples of how the inferior product with the faster and larger installed base tends to prevail:

John Kay - Betamax vs. VHS

From my experience Yahoo provides vastly better B2B results than Google. Yet Yahoo's share of this market appears to be diminsihing fast. Why no major attempt - e.g. a massive marketing campaign - to drive up market share?