Successful Search Engine Marketing – 4. Where to buy your traffic
Monday, January 11th, 2010So far, my posts in the ‘Successful Search Engine Marketing’ series have focused on techniques which will come in useful when buying traffic on any search engine. However, all the keyword, ad text and landing page optimization in the world will only get you so far if you’re buying traffic from the wrong places. In this fourth post, I’ll be addressing this issue by giving you some tips on which traffic sources offer good value for money, and which ones are best approached with caution.
Which search engines should I buy my traffic from?
When they think about search, the company which immediately springs to mind for most people is, of course, Google. The statistics bear this out pretty clearly: according to Nielsen NetRatings, in November 2009 Google served 15.4 billion page views in the US alone. By comparison, Yahoo Search served 2.7 billion impressions and Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ engine served almost 2 billion. No other search engine passed the 1 billion mark. In many European countries, Google’s share of searches is even greater than in the US, topping 90% in markets such as Germany. As a result of this, advertisers also almost invariably start with Google when thinking about SEM, and many never investigate the other options in the market.
While this is understandable, in my view it’s a mistake to restrict yourself to Google AdWords, for reasons I’ll come to later. Nonetheless, it is the obvious place to start, since it is difficult to imagine a successful SEM strategy which doesn’t include Google. Not only does Google dominate its rivals when it comes to traffic volumes, it also tends to set the standards which other search engines follow in areas such as advertiser policies, how to determine ad quality, and targeting options available to advertisers – so familiarity with Google will stand you in good stead when advertising on other engines. For people new to SEM, Google also offers clear, detailed help content. Google’s superior search volumes, combined with delivering traffic of a consistently high quality to advertisers, means that most advertisers should expect to spend the majority of their SEM budgets with Google, though the extent to which this is the case will differ according to the relative market share each engine enjoys in the countries in which you are advertising.
Despite Google’s many advantages over competing search engines, I would still encourage anyone who is serious about driving traffic to their sites via SEM to experiment with Google’s largest rivals. The offerings from Yahoo! and Microsoft, Yahoo! Search Marketing (commonly known as YSM) and Microsoft AdCenter, both operate in much the same way as Google AdWords: keywords are organized into Campaigns and AdGroups; different ad text variations can be rotated for each Ad Group; and a ‘Quality Score’ measure is used to denote the relevance of your ads for each keyword. These shared attributes across engines makes it relatively simple to take your existing Google AdWords campaigns and apply them to YSM and AdCenter – indeed, Yahoo and Microsoft have both made conscious efforts over the last few years to align their systems more closely with AdWords partly in order to make it easier to transfer campaigns from Google.  (more…)
