Project Panama Impact Wanes, Study Says

NEW YORK The revenue impact of Project Panama, Yahoo!'s nearly year-old search advertising product enhancement, is waning, based on a new report issued jointly by search ad technology provider SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets. After exhibiting encouraging signs of growth in the third quarter, Yahoo!'s Q4 market share dipped slightly (-0.9 percent), said the report. Meanwhile Google, which based on the report had shown some signs of slippage this summer, actually saw its market share climb a percentage point in the fourth quarter—further cementing its category dominance.In fact, despite that minimal hiccup over the summer, SearchIgnite president Barnette said market share among the big three search players—Google, Yahoo! and MSN—was remarkably consistent throughout the year. Based on the 20 billion impressions and 320 million clicks on the three properties that SearchIgnite tracked throughout 2007, Google maintained a commanding lead, Yahoo! held steadily in second place and MSN remained a distant third.Meanwhile, while marketshare exhibited little variance, the growth in the search ad business remained robust. In 2007, spending surged by 27 percent versus the previous year, according to the report, driven in part by a major influx of retail dollars during the fourth quarter (up 72 percent over Q4 2006). And despite some fears that search traffic and advertising dropped near the end of last year (including an alarming report issued recently by search agency Didit), Barnette saw no reason to worry. "Fourth quarter was a great quarter," he said. "We didn't see any real drop-off." If anything, Barnette said that holiday online shopping slowed earlier than the previous year due to the fact that retailers were stricter about pre-Christmas shipping dates and the fact that Thanksgiving fell a week earlier. "That was more calendar driven than anything else," he said.Barnette's team is also confident that recession worries are not that troublesome to the search advertising industry. "The increases in spend are decreasing," he said. "And that might be the earliest signs of a maturing market. But I don't know a single client that wants to decrease spending in 2008."

Performance Marketing

Project Panama Impact Wanes, Study Says

Mike Shields

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