Google, Yahoo or Natural Search - Which Provides the Best Quality Visitors?

November 8th, 2006 by Mike Read more about Articles

We asked ourselves this question recently and decided to compare buy rates across one of our popular sites.

Here’s what we found on analyzing 100,000 visitors.

Natural Search

4.51% of visitors finding us through natural search (typing in a keyword on Google and clicking on our site in the search results) made a purchase.

Google Adwords

4.00% of visitors from Google Adwords made a purchase. Less than natural search - but not much less. Google advertising works and it shows!

Now let’s compare Google to Yahoo.

Yahoo (formerly Overture) Ads

A mere 3.30% made a purchase from Yahoo. Perhaps because Yahoo ads look MORE like ads than Google’s way of displaying ads. Google advertising produced better visitors - visitors more willing to buy.

But before you abandon Yahoo - keep this in mind - precisely because Yahoo produced lower quality visitors they have less advertisers for you to compete with. So you’ll find that bidding for the same keywords on Yahoo is often much cheaper than Google.

Comparing the Cost per Sale for Google and Yahoo

We were paying 0.17 cents per click on Google

and 0.15 cents per click on Yahoo.

This means it cost us $4.25 to make a sale on Google while $4.54 to make a sale on Yahoo. The cost per sale was only marginally higher for Yahoo.

Yahoo of course - delivers less traffic. only 30% of our sales from PPC clicks come from Yahoo. The rest come from Google Adwords.

But if you are ignoring Yahoo - you could be ignoring 30% of your market.

This is why you should never abandon your Yahoo ads.

It’s also for this reason that we decided to include a chapter on Yahoo in our new book. Just getting on the Yahoo bandwagon can help you boost your sales by 30%.

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike

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2 Responses to “Google, Yahoo or Natural Search - Which Provides the Best Quality Visitors?”

November 9th, 2006 at 7:45 am Jim
The thing that actually surprised me the most from this post was the cost per click on both google and yahoo. I’m curious as to how you were able to keep your cost per click so low but were still able to get almost 100,000 visitors. Were most of your clicks from long tail search terms or were they just low default bids or not highly sought after terms?
November 10th, 2006 at 8:37 pm vishen
good point - we get such low bid rates for two reasons:

1. we started advertising early - way back in Dec 2002 and our campaigns have a history. We kept fine-tuning our performance over the years and boosting our CTR rates.

2. We use adwords.clickmuse.com - our own invention. It’s free for now so try it. Adwords let’s be revise and innovate on our ads much better than before. Since using it we managed to boost AVG CTRs by close to 40% and further bring down bid prices from 18 cents to 16 cents. And that’s just over the last 4 months.

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