Google, Yahoo, Microsoft: Year-To-Date PPC Report Card

Many of you have asked questions about PPC and their effectiveness.  Once again a friend/expert has done an excellent, straightforward analysis that I share with the eTaildTail community that will help all online merchants better manage and understand PPC advertising, spending, and expectations of performance theirin.  This is a must read! -- Ed

By Alan Rimm-Kaufmann

For complete analysis and story please see: http://searchengineland.com/070731-081817.php

"As 2007 is now half over, it seems a good time to compare the performance of the Big Three search engines year-to-date.

The punch line: Google reigns dominant, providing the lion's share of clicks, and Google clicks convert well. Microsoft offers strongly converting clicks at a lower-than-expected cost—good efficiency, but sadly almost no volume. Yahoo commands 22% of ad spend, but lags in click quality.

The Sample

My agency provides paid search management for about 100 sites, some from the Internet Retailer 100, most from the IR500. About 85% of our clients are B2C; about 15% are B2B. Our client base is largely direct response advertisers—catalogers and pure-plays who buy clicks to sell product, in contrast to advertisers who buy clicks for branding or traffic.

Nearly all of our clients instruct us to run their paid search campaigns to achieve their economic goals. That is, none of our clients establish a priori budget levels by engine. Our portfolio bidding platform optimizes ad budgets, buying the most effective clicks first. Thus, an increase in ad spend on one engine, relative to the others, reflects an increase in click quality relative to the others.

We've aggregated our results across all our clients for these observations.

The Methodology

Our agency has grown steadily during 2007. Because of this growth, graphing absolute spend and clicks says more about our performance than about the performance of the engines.

To remove the effects of our own growth and of seasonality, we've normalized the data by dividing each engine's data by the monthly total of the three engines, thus expressing each engine as a percentage of the monthly whole.

To simplify this analysis, we've excluded data from Ask, paid inclusion, and the shopping comparison engines.

In all the graphs which follow, Google is represented inblue, Yahoo inred, and Microsoft ingreen.

Ad Spend

As we've previously reported, Google comprises about 73% of our total agency pay-per-click ad spend that goes to the Big Three engines. Yahoo comprises 21%, and MSN at 6% takes up the rest...."

<<<<CLICK HERE FOR ALL CHARTS, MORE COMMENTARY AND COMPLETE INFORMATION -- it is an excellent analysis and must for everyone>>>

For complete analysis and story please see: http://searchengineland.com/070731-081817.php