Pay for performance, shortly P4P, is the basic business practice that Yahoo (formerly Overture) invented. Foreseeing the explosion of Internet Business and the role of Advertising in that world, Yahoo entered the league earlier with performing devices much earlier.

Advertisements are necessary for attracting the visitors to a site thereby to getting an increase in sales. Yahoo provides an opportunity for the sites to place their ads that gets displayed when the user keys in a keyword or a keyword phrase.

When user types a keyword or a phrase, along with the search result, the advertisements get displayed on the right side of the screen. These advertising links undoubtedly attract the visitors to sites and increase their traffic. Even if only a fraction of the traffic gets converted into actual sales, this is surely an advantageous feature that sites look for.

Yahoo’s advertising principle is much similar to Google’s AdSense.

In Yahoo, when a user searches a specific keyword or a phrase, if you had specified the same keywords for your site, your ads get displayed. It is not necessary that your site should have been Search Engine Optimized. Just the match of keywords, your ads are shown.

But you need to pay Yahoo for this service. Yahoo charges a fee based on the number and nature of your keywords and the number of times your ads get clicked by the user. This expense is truly justifiable as your ads that pop up when a user searches for a keyword related your site invariably increases your site’s traffic, thereby sales and ultimately your profit.

Even third party sites would place your ads, if your site were related with their field of operation.

Placing Ads this way is undoubtedly a low cast but nevertheless effective marketing strategy, which results in immediate benefits on a large scale.