PayPal Buttons to Appear on Yahoo Sponsored Search Listings

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |

Having watched Google Checkout add lots of little blue shopping cart symbols to AdWords listings, PayPal obviously decided that was a great idea, and tapped Yahoo to help them out.

Yahoo’s so excited with their partnership that they’ve announced it twice. And why not? It’s a win for both Yahoo and PayPal.

PayPal gets a channel to display merchants that offer PayPal payment options - which will no doubt help increase awareness of PayPal and hence consumer use.

Yahoo, meanwhile, will likely see a slight increase in click-thrus to its sponsores search listings. I’m a fan of PayPal - as it allows me to maker a purchase without having to go get my credit card - and I’m sure other fans will favor merchant listings that offer PayPal.

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12 Responses to “PayPal Buttons to Appear on Yahoo Sponsored Search Listings”

  1. Jeremy Luebke Says:

    Yahoo & Paypal/Ebay needs this. They need to counter the juggernaut that is Google.

    To tell the truth, the ONLY logical way I see to battle Google is for Yahoo & Ebay/Paypal to merge or one buy the other out. They both need to make some serious moves to counter Google owning the web.

  2. Andy Beal Says:

    Jeremy - I tend to agree, and how often do we see mergers/acquisitions soon after partnerships? ;-)

  3. Brian Says:

    Andy and fellow Pilgrim readers,
    Related to this topic, I’m curious to see if anyone has any insight you could share with regard to those little Google Checkout ads. Better yet, anyone have any numbers to share?

    Our company competes heavily in our category under AdWords (yes we’re guilting of feeding the new monopoly) and we’ve done well so far.

    We’ve been debating adding Google Checkout buttons to make our listings stand out. The flip side is that (I think) we’d get more “curiosity clicks” from our competitors and random people who haven’t seen an ad like that before.

    Thoughts?

  4. Webmaster Money Says:

    Very nice to see the competition on the Internet. PayPal feels insecure I think and this way it will make it stronger against Google which is trying to own the Internet.

  5. Runa Says:

    There’s something strange in the following, recent co-operations:

    skype-ebay
    paypal-ebay
    skype-google
    ebay-google

    and also

    paypal-yahoo

  6. Andy Beal Says:

    @Brian - I don’t have any data myself. I wonder if it would help increase click thru’s for e-commerce web sites - assuming the search term is a “buy” phrase of some sort. Can you not turn them off if you don’t like them? If you can, I’d simply test it for a week - as an a/b type test.

  7. Mark Barrera Says:

    @Brian - The image next to your ad does help increase CTR. During the holidays, there was also a noticeable increase in sales but I would attribute that to all the free money and discounts that Google was giving out to people who used the Google Checkout feature.

    On the negative side, the integration of Checkout into your site can be a tedious process depending on the size and complexity of your shopping cart software. They are working to get rid of some of the bugs, but I have seen clients end up scrapping the whole thing just do to integration issues.

  8. Brian Says:

    thanks guys, I think the A/B test is a good call.

  9. Juhan Says:

    It is nice that they are joining their forces with Yahoo! to stop Google from taking over the world, but instead of making these pointless contracts or what ever they should be expanding their service to countries that aren’t supported yet. I am from Estonia and it is nice that we can have these “cool” send only accounts, but at the times when most of the online transactions are done via PayPal this really isn’t enough. I used to get at least one email every day asking me if I could accept PayPal payments or why I don’t accept PayPal payments few months ago, now most of the people have already understood that not everybody can use PayPal, so now I get only approximately 1 email every week asking for PayPal (I do online business). This is how they are loosing the most, I understand that Google Checkout currently accepts only USA and UK sellers, but there are also MoneyBookers, E-Gold, AlertPay, StormPay that are growing due to the limitations of PayPal. Also there are still many credit card payments they could be processing if they’d just start working on expanding their services to countries that aren’t in the “send/receive” list. I am sure it is fun to fight over the USA marked, but USA isn’t the world.

  10. » Google and Yahoo Turf Wars Heat Up SEO Vision: Internet, Web News from Hall Marketing Says:

    [...] In a desperate fight for life, Yahoo has taken several aggressive initiatives of their own — notably, the so-far-successful new Panama ad-platform — and most recently, a push to extend their ad network into a variety of newspapers’ web sites and now a partnership with PayPal to add branded buttons to their sponsored search listings. [...]

  11. PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management : PPC Weekly Roundup - 4/20/2007 Says:

    [...] Despite each company claiming not to be in competition with each other, PayPal raises the stakes against Google Checkout once again. PayPal has joined forces with Yahoo! to place icons with paid search listings. [...]

  12. 4b1L Says:

    what do you think about the people on paypalsucks.com? have you read it?

    4b1L’s last blog post..Internet Axis Unlimited

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