eBay Inc. is the number one and number two sponsored link advertiser for both Google and Yahoo!, reports Nielsen/NetRatings. Dwarfing other advertisers in the top five, eBay and eBay’s Shopping.com have spent more on search marketing than Target and Interactive Corp. combined (and then some).
In January, Google served up 984,204 eBay sponsored link impressions, and 447,591 for Shopping.com. The third biggest spender at Google was Interchange Corporation’ s Local.com (279,250 impressions), followed by Target Corp. and Interactive Corp.’s Expedia, Inc. with 218,140 impressions and 197,329 impressions respectively.
Yahoo!, during the same time period raked in 537,137 sponsored link impressions from eBay and 501,195 from Shopping.com. The nearest advertisers were Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix (151,642), Interactive Corp.’s Lending Tree (116,303), and Target (79,013).
“E-commerce advertisers, eBay chief among them, represent the top advertisers on both Yahoo! and Google. It is becoming increasingly clear that sponsored link advertising is a necessary cost of doing business for e-commerce companies,” said Ken Cassar, chief analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings.
Over the past six months sponsored link advertising grew by 16 percent across both engines, with Google sponsored links rising 14 percent, and Yahoo! increasing by 21 percent.
Though Yahoo! was able to outpace Google in percentage, Google still nearly doubles Yahoo!’s sponsored link impression count with 41.1 billion to Yahoo!’s 23.2 billion.
“Despite the overwhelming market share that Google and Yahoo! search enjoy, they continue to see strong growth in the volume of sponsored links,” said Cassar. “While Google, in particular, seeks to diversify its revenue, it is a positive sign that its core search advertising business remains robust.”
Wonder how long it will take before we see Google and Yahoo homepages “brought to you by” You Know Who?”
