Microsoft Advertising Blog

Quality of The UK Live Search Click

posted Fri, May 08 2009

Everyone’s feeling the pinch at the moment, and advertising budgets are no exception, with more focus on ROI and value for money than there’s been for a long time.

Obviously search engine marketing is one of the key channels for the canny advertiser – but not all cost-per-click programs offer the same return for your money.

Using Nielsen figures from the last 3 months, we can see broadly what consumers do after clicking on a search result. What we see is that on average, a consumer in the UK will spend a little under 3 and a half minutes on the site that they click through to. We can also see that about 5% of the time they will then click through to a secure section of that site where they would generally be entering their details, registering for offers or even making a purchase.

These are valuable figures – it’s this dwell time and interaction that you’re aiming for with your search campaign!

But the data also show us that these numbers vary by search engine. Based on these 3 months’ worth of data – and this is a trend that’s visible over the last few years’ data as well – searchers clicking on a link on Live Search spend nearly 5 minutes on the destination site, on average, and 7% of them go to the secure pages on those sites.

That means Live Searchers are 45% more engaged and 42% more likely to interact on a site than the average consumer after clicking through from a search results page.

And that means that you’re getting significantly more value for your search spend on Live Search than on other search engines.

This data is backed up by feedback we get from our advertisers. Although there may not be the volume marketers want right now, the quality is still there.

We understand that marketers have to think about the return on their TIME investment too, so that’s why we’re encouraging them to use the adCenter Desktop and Excel Add-In to create greater efficiencies when managing their campaigns.

Check them out and let us know what you think in the adCenter forums!

Thanks

Nick

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Comments

Sat, May 09 2009 01:54AM

Guy Hoogewerf

I am sorry to disappoint you, but the truth is a little more difficult to find. On research based on our user testing results we found that - Google users were more competent with a computer and thus could make decisions faster and tended to know what they were doing and looking for.

People using Live Search were less competent at using a a computer and had not yet figured out how to change search engines, they therefore just used what was loaded on their machine to begin with. You'd be surprised how true this turns out to be. The result is that they struggles to find us and then struggled to make a purchase which is why the figures you have quoted do not surprise me.

Yahoo - sorry Yahoo - conversion are OK - but quantity is so small, we make a token effort with Yahoo, but actually use Yahoo to lower our overall cost per click or sale. It works.

Just some food for thought...
Mon, May 11 2009 04:25AM

Nick Drew

Hi Guy,

These figures just stick to the measurable ROI benefits of the different engines. While it may be that the data stem from different patterns of use of the search engines, we figure that for ppc advertisers, the key campaign metrics are how much consumer engagement and purchase intent they’re getting for their money. And on those measures, it’s clear which search engines provide better value for money. Encouragingly, this pattern is consistently shown by both this and other data sources, too.

In terms of specific reasons for these findings, it’s not very clear. Our own research indicates that Live Searchers are more likely to cite trust as a reason than users of other engines for using their engine of choice; they’re also more positive about paid search links and their relevance than other searchers. But that’s probably not the whole answer, and I suspect more research is required to comprehensively understand why this difference in ROI exists.