While Google and Bing might be your main breadwinners for paid search, don’t count out little-used platform Yahoo Gemini to gain some efficiency.
What is Yahoo Gemini?
Iterations of Yahoo Gemini have been around since February 2014. Starting as a way to leverage mobile and tablet traffic, Gemini’s main focus in those early days was on native ads. These ads blend into articles and look more “native” to the platforms they live in -- maybe on Facebook or while scrolling through a quick news digest.
In 2015, Microsoft and Yahoo adjusted their contract and allowed Yahoo to serve Gemini ads for up to half of Yahoo.com’s desktop traffic. Prior to that, all desktop traffic ads came from Bing Ads. While Gemini may be small, it is mighty.
From Gemini's site: “Yahoo Search serves over 100B unique searches per year; 22% of the searchers can’t be found on other engines.”
22%? I might not be a super math-whiz, but to me, that sounds like almost a quarter of your potential business is getting lost to advertisers smart enough to already be using Yahoo Gemini.
And you want to talk about above the fold? I did a quick search for “local flower shops” and got this result. ALL of these listings are ads:
The Test
We approached our client with the idea of testing Gemini as a way to regain efficiency in 2017. Our client is an e-commerce player in the medical industry and competition can be a tad scrappy on the Big Two (Google and Bing).
Increased competition from other advertisers in the later half of the year had affected our performance and we wanted to find an outlet that was a little less crowded.
Luckily, our client is very open to testing and gave us their blessing to proceed, as long as we kept an eye on ROAS.
The Results
We launched Yahoo Gemini on November 20th and have seen tremendous potential from this little engine that could.
In the last 60 days, our total investment has been $888 and revenue has been $2,818. That’s a return on ad spend of 3.17.
Average CPCs are 27% lower than Google and 15% lower than Bing.
The Breakdown
Bottom line, if you or your client is struggling with efficiency, toss some dough toward Yahoo! You never know where your future customers are searching.
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Date range is 11/20/2017 - 1/19/2018
Google CPC: 3.65
Bing CPC: 3.15
Gemini CPC: 2.68
