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Business Information Review
- Dec 03 - Search engine marketing
Google AdWords | Overture
| eSpotting | Findwhat
Google
Adwords
Google first began offering advertisers positions on its site in January
2000 with its Google AdWords product. The company has offices in the
US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada. Google claims that
its ad clients have an average click-through rate of 2% of all impressions
- which is much higher than the rate for banner ads. The company does
not offer 'paid inclusion' i.e. charging an annual or click through
fee per URL for inclusion in its editorial listings.
Google monitors companies acquiring rivals'
brand names for their own campaigns, but will only actually remove the
ads of a company sponsoring such keywords if they injured party files
a complaint. The company also powers editorial search results at a large
number of sites including Yahoo, AOL and the BBC. The privately owned
company is estimated to have a 2003 turnover of between US $700 million
and US$ 1 billion.
Overture
founded in 1997 as GoTo, US based Overture
Services pioneered search engine keyword sponsorship. In July 2003
Yahoo acquired the company for US $1.63 billion. Prior to its acquisition,
the company had offices in the US, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
France and Japan. Like Espotting, the company serves its clients' ads
via a distribution network of search engines .
eSpotting
eSpotting Media claims to be Europe's largest pay-for-performance search
provider, and has operations in ten countries (UK, France, Germany,
Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Ireland and Switzerland) servicing
more than 16,000 advertisers across Europe. It won the award for 'Best
Paid Placement Service' from influential industry site, SearchEngineWatch.com.
It provides paid search results at Yahoo Europe, Lycos Europe, Euroseek,
Ask Jeeves, Tiscali, BT LookSmart, Netscape and Kelkoo. Uniquely, Espotting
displays company/sponsor logos next to all listings. On 18 June 2003,
the company announced that it would merge with US-based Findwhat.com.
Findwhat
Findwhat.com was founded in 1998 and listed on the US NASDAQ the following
year. The FindWhat.com Network includes hundreds of distribution partners,
such as CNET's Search.com, Excite, WebCrawler, NBCi, MetaCrawler, Dogpile,
Go2Net and Microsoft Internet Explorer Autosearch.
Related article: Search revenue
models, Information World Review, Sept 02
Related page: Company profiles
- Search engines
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