CogBlog

Recently we've been researching large lists of phrases within particular categories for a client. We're taking a category as a whole, researching top search phrases within the category and plotting this against bid levels for the top 20 Yahooo Search Marketing positions. It is very interesting to see the level of competition, or lack of, in particular verticals.

Bid levels tend to vary both as a function of the number of advertisers bidding on a particular phrase and the level of price competition for a top spot. If you were to try to fit an exponential curve to the level of price decay by position the curve will be much more flat for some phrases than for others. It would be interesting to see how this changes over time. I would suspect that as competition increases, and as fewer new advertisers bid on a particular phrase the curve will flatten out.

Finance categories are extremely competitive. One of the most competitive phrases I've seen yet is "life insurance settlements" with the top three positions all bidding over $35/click. The chart above shows the curve for "mortgage note buyers" and "online home equity loans", both of which have nearly the same top bid (~$9.50) but very different competition curves.

I'll see if I can post more of these oh-so-interesting observations in the future. That'll keep you coming back...