June 19th, 2006

Search engines battle for features

Google recently announced it is now allowing dayparting in their AdWords system. This will allow Google advertisers to target their ads by day of week and the time of day. Curiously, this announcement comes just one month after the official US launch of Microsoft’s competing search advertising program, MSN adCenter. The MSN adCenter system was the first of the top tier search advertising systems (which also includes Google and Yahoo) to offer dayparting as well as targeting by demographics.

Of course, Yahoo is not too far behind. Days after the release of MSN adCenter, Yahoo announced a full system revamp that would take place in Fall ‘06. While all of the details on the new system are not yet clear, it does appear that Yahoo is looking to quickly catch up to its rivals.

So what does this mean for search advertisers? Well, we are hoping the competition will be a good thing. As is already apparent, we are likely going to see a growing feature list being offered, giving advertisers more flexibility and the knowledge needed to spend their marketing dollars wisely. With this, more advertisers will probably spread their media dollars over all three top tier systems, and this will hopefully put click prices at more realistic levels. Personally, I am just glad to see that these companies finally listening to feedback from advertisers and making changes to meet our needs.