As I’ve written before, search marketing can be used for a number of applications beyond its seemingly primary role of driving visits and revenue. For several years now, many major brands with national advertising campaigns are making use of search in their offline advertising. These ads, be they billboards, magazine or television spots ask the consumer to search for a phrase; often the brand itself or a term related to the campaign.

Smart-arse advertising by Google. If you got this without looking it up, you deserve to work there.

There are good reasons for this which I’ll quickly state:

• Search adds measurability to the campaign. The search data can be monitored and therefore the impact of the ad can be gauged.

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Almost a year ago now Yahoo teamed up with Nectar to produce a search bar which earns you Nectar points for every search you make. At first glance this looked like an innovative way for Yahoo to claw back some of the market share that it has been losing to Google.

In December 2009 Yahoo commanded a 14% share of the UK search engine market (source www.impactmedia.co.uk) as of last month this share has been almost completely eclipsed by Bing’s growth and Google’s incredible market dominance and had shrunk to 2.86%. Clearly enlisting Nectar’s help had done nothing to stem the tide so what went wrong?

For Yahoo, or indeed any other search engine, to make any real ground on Google there is a lot more work that needs doing. I used the toolbar to make searches and build up my stock of Nectar points over the last month, almost 30 days after I downloaded the toolbar I had used it for a grand total of 2 days and collected only 69 points and I am back using Google with relish!

Unfortunately for both Yahoo and Nectar all this experience has highlighted to me is that Yahoo is not particularly user friendly or, indeed, that pleasing to the eye. Plus, in my view it is simply made too complicated to collect Nectar points online!

Obviously, Yahoo and Nectar needed to limit the amount of points they were going to be giving to people or they would have had people like me doing hundreds of searches a day just to rack up a few extra points. Limiting it to 50 points a month, however, removes most of the incentive from the initiative. It is still free money but at £3 a year for using a search engine, I can’t see anyone bothering!

My advice to Yahoo would be to work on making their site look a bit more up to date. The whole concept still looks like it hasn’t been updated since it was first created in 1994. It is a real shame that a company that started something innovative and forward thinking doesn’t seem to have remained that way. They always seem to come in a step behind Google causing their market share to drop at an alarming rate. I wonder how long they have left.