The leaders in paid search are currently Google and Yahoo. At this time, MSN provides paid search listings from Yahoo in their SERPs. As a marketer, which paid search program should you choose? What are the demographics and psychographics of each search engine?
To know the true answer for your industry and your site, the professional marketer’s answer is to test it out. This is because many factors influence your results and no one can really tell you which one is profitable or not unless they tested and measured or did some in-depth search engine market intelligence. If after testing, you find that you make approximately the same from each search engine’s paid listings, you would be better off being in both because you’d have exposure not just from people entering direct searches but also exposure from Adsense and YPN publishers. Another consideration is also if what you do with the leads your generate. You will also want to test your landing pages among other factors. If you drive traffic to create a subscriber list and still break even, it would be worthwhile to capture both markets at the same time. Since these ads are pay-for-performance, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have free exposure on lots of other sites.
Before you start testing, however, let’s look at some current internet trends, demographics, psychographics, differing ad placement in the listings and other factors that could affect the responsiveness of your paid advertising.
Total Volume of Search Users
According to comScore Networks Inc, the volume of searches done on the major search engines vary greatly. Google`s total audience in June of unique visitors for paid and unpaid search including the ad publisher sites stood at 79.96 million as compared with 64.03 million for Yahoo sites and 47.77 million for MSN sites. AOL had 34.06 million searchers, while Ask Jeeves had 39.82 million.
Demographics
The engine audiences also differed slightly in demographics according to comScore Networks. Among the top five engines, the search audiences at MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves leaned towards the female searchers. The women made up: 51% of MSN search users, 51.9% of searchers at AOL, and 53.7% at Ask Jeeves. Google’s users leans the other way, towards males at: 51.5% while Yahoo`s users split almost right down the middle. What implications does all this have for you as a search engine marketer? Well, if your target audience is predominantly female, it would mean a tremendous difference to your bottom line.
Psychographics
According to ComScore`s buying power index–the average of any given demographic group`s propensity to buy online–shows that MSN search users were 48% more likely than the average Internet user to buy online, versus Google search users (which is 42% more likely to buy); and Yahoo search users, 31% more likely. Ask Jeeves search users were 17% more likely to buy than the average Internet users, and AOL Search users, 3% more likely. James Lamberti, vice president at comScore says, “That`s important to showing the value of the consumer and the fact that they have money in their pockets”.
Search User Intent
Results also suggest the possibility of different user intent at different engines. ComScore sees less challenging search activity and the use of simpler search terms at the portals–Yahoo, MSN, and AOL compared to Google which resulted in more complex search queries. “What that suggests to us is that when consumers have a more challenging research task, they may be thinking about Google as a way to get that done,” adds Lamberti.
Final Ad Listing Positions Relative to Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Google and Yahoo rank paid ad listings differently in the SERPs. Yahoo gives the highest bidder the top listing and this applies for it’s sponsored listings for any given keyword phrase. While this lets marketers know exactly which position they will be getting based on what they are spend and control the paid listing rankings, it has its disadvantages which Google takes into account.
Google prefers to use ad relevancy, the ad bid price, and the ad click-through rates to determine the final ranking of paid results listing for any given keyword phrase. Therefore, marketers are not in full control of whether they get top positions.
“We treat click-through rate as a vote by the end user,” says John McAteer, head of Google Retail. “By clicking, users are telling the advertiser what is most important to them.” Google believes that ranking ads this way delivers much more meaningful results to web searchers.
The director of the retail search category for Yahoo Search Marketing, Diane Rinaldo, points out that Google’s PPC model gives marketers that have a strong click-through rate an advantage. She says, “With our model, they bid for position, but then, those marketers with strong click-through rates don’t have the same advantage they have on Google”.
Ad Listing Formats
Google`s paid listings format leaves little space for copy resulting in users clicking on the ad in order to read the full text. Yahoo`s format provides more room for your copy, offering you the opportunity to add words that could increase ad click0through rates.
Main Keyword Phrases Profitability
Based on your set of research keyword phrases to test and measure your campaign success, you will want to track factors like your cost per order, ROI, and traffic sources for every dollar invested. Only then can you determine whether your PPC marketing campaign works or not.
Summary
Managing paid search campaigns with the two major engines at the moment is a large management task on its own. Add to the fact that the PPC landscape may be set to change soon as MSN is expected to launch its own paid search product, eventually replacing its paid search feed listings gathered from Yahoo which could happen within the next few months.
Ask Jeeves or Ask.com, the 4th largest search engine announced in August the launch of its own paid advertising network, currently operates under the keyword bidding model similar to Google’s and Yahoo’s. Ask runs its own paid listings together with those it currently obtains from Google under a revenue sharing contract which expires in 2007. Eventually, Ask’s paid search offering could be independent of the other search engines as well.
Search engine marketers currently using spreadsheets to manage their PPC campaigns should consider using tools like automated PPC campaign management that offer bid management tools and services as their PPC campaign tracking gets more unwieldly. PPC campaign management services like LocalLaunch and ReachLocal. It will save you a lot of time and energy in keeping up with the PPC analytics while helping to focus on the more important factors like ad testing and maximizing ROI in the long run.