Where are you plowing your online ad dollars? You could be targeting the wrong search giant.
A recent study by online competitive firm, Hitwise, argues that while Yahoo and Google are competitive in the amount of search they receive, the big spenders and affluent consumers of the online world tend to gravitate toward Google.
I’ve always had an admitted bias toward Google, but this study could explain the dismal results I received when advertising for CRM services at Technology Advisors. During my time there we spent equal dollars on Google AdWords and the Overture (Yahoo) ad services. At the end of each month we had tons of clicks and conversions from Google, but few if any from Overture. While we were running out of funds on Google half way through the day, we never came near the spend limit on Yahoo.
Eventually we quit the Overture program because the lead stream was so small and those that did come through appeared to be click fraud. The search traffic for our terms was significantly less than Google and our CTR and conversions equally poor. I did a bunch of testing in an attempt to improve results, but with no luck. In the back of my mind I always felt that the Overture network was simply advertising to the wrong audience for our services. More research is needed, but certainly this makes me feel a little less crazy.
Now this is one anecdotal story and I recognize the foolishness of analyzing the small sample size, but when I see a study like this I have to wonder. Our targets were C-level business executives. Are those people Yahoo or Google users? Again, more research is needed, but it would be interesting to see the amount of B-to-B services (consulting, finance, major infrastructure investments, etc…) that are sold through Google vs. those sold through Yahoo. My gut tells me that if you want to sell high end B-to-B services that you avoid Yahoo.
For now my advice is to use both of them and determine a strategy after you see your own results. Every company is different and like most online strategies the only way to learn the right way is to test, analyze, and improve. But if you see one search engine with better results than the other, you’ll have one clue.
