Merinda Peppard, Efficient Frontier’s European Marketing Manager spoke today to an 80 strong crowd at the combined SMX London and eMetrics conference on Monday. Changing dates seems to have worked in favour for SMX, which has suffered light attendance in the past. The break out areas were a sea of networking as the large delegation took advantage of the extended break times. Great lunch too! Speaking on a panel together with Linus Gregoriadis from Econsultancy, amongst others, Merinda presented the key findings from the Efficient Frontier Q1 2009, Search Engine Performance Report.
It was interesting that Econsultancy presented their Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report which states that only 44% of Search advertisers use Yahoo and only 30% use Microsoft. Efficient Frontier certainly sees good results on both engines and our Q1 2009, Search Engine Performance Report shows our sample set of advertisers spend on average:
- 80.6% of entire search budgets on Google Search
- 9.5% of entire search budgets on Yahoo Search
- 6% of entire search budgets on Google Content
- 3.9% of entire search budgets on Microsoft Live Search
So there is something amiss here. If an advertiser spends £100,000 per month on paid search, then Efficient Frontier allocates close to £10K on Yahoo and £4K on Microsoft. This is still significant spend for any advertiser. Since our portfolio optimisation technology only calculates the split of share between engines based on mathematical tradeoffs, surely those advertisers surveyed by Econsultancy are missing out on good ROI from Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo? Certainly it is essential not to treat the search engines the same, a recommendation which we posted previously on our blog. For serious advertisers, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search should be considered, and engine budgets need to be fluid in order to allow for dynamic performance shifts.
If you did not attend SMX London and you would like a copy of Merinda’s presentation, please contact us on sales-europe@efrontier.com
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