The Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Market in 2007

The PPC marketplace continued to grow strongly in 2007. Emerging economies such as India and China, together with the entry of high street brands such as Walmart, contributing to a 37% growth in overall volume.

Our table shows the marketshare of the three largest PPC players, and is based on the averages for January 2007-2008 reported by Nielson, comScore and Hitwise.

Vendor	January 2007	January 2008	Change	Trend
Google	71.4%	76.7%	+5.3%	Peaking
Yahoo	21.2%	16.1%	-5.1%	Declining
Microsoft	6.1%	5.7%	-0.4%	Static
Others	1.3%	1.5%	+0.2%	Static

Worldwide PPC Marketshare

Commentary and Analysis

Google AdWords

Google's dominance of the PPC market continued throughout 2007. In addition to the momentum already behind AdWords, their introduction of a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) model, together with extensions for mobile, radio and print advertising kept AdWords "ahead of the game".

Yahoo Search Marketing

While Yahoo's introduction of the new Panana platform helped raise their game temporarily, it was not enough to stem the long-term decline in their share of the PPC market. Despite some innovative programmes, it remains "too little too late" for this Internet veteran.

Microsoft adCenter

Despite a huge investment in adCenter, Microsoft's share of the PPC market remained static. The obvious strategy for them now is the one they've just announced - the acquisition of Yahoo. However, even this would only yield the same marketshare Yahoo had 12 months ago.

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