This week our UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q1 2008 was released. Google is by far the dominant search engine in the UK, with 85% of search engine spending in Q1 2008. Its ROI by increased by 14% since Q4 2007, despite a small drop in CTR from Q4 07 to Q1 08.
Q1 2008 showed
a difficult quarter for Yahoo in the UK, with a CTR decline of 38% and a subsequent decline in ROI of 6% versus Q4
2007. Much of this decline might be attributable to Yahoo's
expansion of its partner syndication network into high volume, lower
quality sources of search traffic, as seen in the US and explained here. MSN increased its share of search slightly from Q4 07 to Q1 08, to account for 3.5% of UK search spending in Q1. MSN also maintained its lead as the engine with the highest ROI in the UK.
With the exception of Japan, Google captures the vast majority of search engine advertising spending in the major global markets in which Efficient Frontier operates. Europe is the most Google-centric, with Google accounting for nearly 96% share of search advertising spending in Q1 2008. In the United States, Google accounted for 77% of search spending, while 93.5% of spending went to Google in Australia. Despite Yahoo’s dominance in Japan, Google gained 6.2 percentage points of search spending in Japan from Q4 2007 to Q1 2008. It's no surprise that in Q1 international markets accounted for 51% of Google's revenues.


