Our post on search engine syndication network performance in the US showed that in general, pure search converts better than syndicated traffic. Efficient Frontier UK data shows a similar trend, as shown in the table below.
We looked at conversions from UK advertisers in 4 different verticals, and found that, on average, 78% of Google's paid search clicks came from google.co.uk or google.com, while only 54% of Yahoo's paid search clicks came from search.yahoo.co.uk or search.yahoo.com. (Note: this data does not include clicks from the engines' respective content networks) Microsoft Live Search doesn't show ads outside of its own search properties in the UK, so was not included in the table.
Yahoo had a wider discrepancy between the percentage of clicks and percentage of conversions than Google (78 - 82% vs 54 -66%), which suggests that Yahoo's average 662 syndicates covert at a much lower rate than Google's average 228 syndicates. Ask and AOL are Google's two biggest UK syndicates, and account for a similar share of clicks and conversions, showing that they drive high quality clicks in comparison to Yahoo's largest syndicates, which include sites like couponmountain.co.uk and findstuff.co.uk.
Data from our UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q1 2008 showed that Google accounted for 85% of UK search engine spending in Q1 2008, compared to Yahoo's 12%. Google's high volume of pure search paid clicks and smaller syndication network relative to Yahoo speaks to the strength of Google's brand in the UK, both as an advertising platform and a destination site.
What was the cost per conversion? How did the delta in conversion costs compare to the conversion rate?
Posted by: Stephen | May 27, 2008 at 07:52 AM