MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

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%.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

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 Reining

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.