Top Search Engine Bidding Shootout
If the Internet is the New Wild West, then the major pay-per-click search engines are shooting it out in the OK Corral. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Adcenter are all just shoveling in cash from search. But which one of the three has the best guns, aim, and bidding strategy against each other?
If you haven’t heard already, brand rules search for conversions. When people don’t know what they want they search for general keywords, when they have their hand on their credit card and they’re ready to convert they search by brand. I’ve done enough paid search marketing to know this by heart.
So to get a sense of the June 2006 search engine shootout I share with you my results of how the top 3 search engines are bidding for their most likely to convert keywords on their own engines and their competitors.
The gunfight - Google bidding on “adwords” & “adsense”, Yahoo bidding on “sponsored search” and Microsoft bidding on “adcenter”.
The Winner: Google
They won but they did not have a clean sweap of bidding on their branded terms across the major search engines since they were nowhere to be seen on AdCenter. I gave them extra points for bidding on “Microsoft Adcenter” through their own engine. Also today none of the engines were crafty enough to bid on each other’s brands through another’s engine. Google’s paid results show us that they understand where the value is in search. The ecommerce knowledge gained from their Urchin purchase appears to reverberate through the company at many levels. I always tip my hat at Google for buying into Web Analytics when they did. Somewhere inside MSN and Yahoo I bet someone is thinking about buying out an analytics company like CoreMetrics. Synergy baby.
Google had some pretty snappy copy running in their paid results:
So Google came out on top as far managing thier brands but that is not to say they have everything figured out. Google would do well investing some of their cash into an eyetracking study to improive their landing page. See the ones around the beta version of IE 7 for a data-driven landing page based on eye tracking studies. We all need IE anyway to run AdCenter and you may as well use 7.
Whose Sort of Figuring it out? Yahoo
Yahoo has some strategic bids for their brands on both their engine and on Google. With a $50 free credit to prove its value I know a lot of small businesses are giving it a try. But they were not bidding on “paid inclusion” anywhere I could see. Yahoo is not the only ones having a hard time marketing this search medium.
Interestingly Yahoo’s listing on Google for “sponsored search” came up in the 8th. I’ve read several studies that suggest this paid position area is the most “economical” for conversion. But as a search engine themselves I’d think they want to show up in the top three, as Google’s results do.
Whose there in spite of themselves? Microsoft
Yes, Microsoft did not grow up as a search engine and it shows in their search campaign for Adcenter. Microsoft struck out on Google, Yahoo, & their own engine with no paid keywords for “adcenter”. While this can be likened to a horse dealer who chooses to walk to the auction, it is also a sign of how fast search is coming of age and new we all really are to its potential.
That said Microsoft is stepping up the pace to embracing the culture of search. Under the hood at AdCenter I was really impressed with the open search query logs and the geo-targeting. I’m keen to blog more about the open query logs available for keyword popularity research. I used to rant about this at LookSmart and always wished the database wells of WordTracker went deeper. Kudos to MS for digesting what WordTracker did into their query logs and making it better. I feel more comfortable with MS handing over our query logs to the Feds if they will also provide the same information to us. I so wish Google would do this.
So what can we gleam from this gunbattle of the titans of search? Certainly the war for search will not be won by engines bidding on each other’s brands, though the war for the dial-up market - maybie. From this study we can see who practices the same cultural values in search that they sell. It appears no one has it all together yet and our west is still very wild.