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Which Search Engines Work Best? A Pay Per Click Study
October 29th, 2009 | 
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Let’s face it, most people don’t track their advertising at all and therefore don’t know where their leads or sales are coming from. I’ve talked with dozens of business owners about which online advertising vehicles work best for them. What I usually hear is that they are impressed with the sites that give them the highest number of clicks. Sure, clicks are encouraging, but do they tell the whole story?
No, the number of clicks or the cost per click (average CPC) does not tell the whole story. Not even close. At the end of the day, it’s not how much you spend per click that really counts - what’s important is how much you spend PER CONVERSION (a truly qualified prospect). And finally, of course, it’s the cost per sale that really matters.
I have been doing pay per click campaigns for some time now. The following are my findings after testing pay-per-click campaigns from September 2006 through February 2007 on the following search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Mamma, Lycos, 7Search and GoClick.
When testing, I chose the same keywords for each campaign and used separate but exact duplicate lead capture pages. This allowed me to see which keyword buys would give me the highest % of qualified prospects. My focus was the “Cost of Conversion” which was the percentage of people who requested more information about my program (a good prospect). My goal was to get clear indication as to the quality of the traffic coming from each search engine.
By taking the average cost-per-click and looking at the % of prospects that requested more information (Name, Phone # & E-mail Address), it gives me the real cost of a qualified lead. Following are the results:
7Search -$0.67 (CPC) $4.04 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Google -$0.83 (CPC) $5.46 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
MSN- $0.70 (CPC) $6.30 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Mamma -$0.34 (CPC) $7.39 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Yahoo -$0.81 (CPC) $8.45 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Lycos -$0.12 (CPC) $17.14 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Go Click -$0.28 (CPC) $20 - (Cost of Qualified Lead)
For a spreadsheet view, follow this link http://www.myedconline.com/Adstudy.html
The study was conducted over several months. After trying to tweak the Lycos and Go Click campaign for about a month, I decided to drop them both. It is also important to note that my conversions decreased over time. This underscores the importance of changing the look and feel of the lead capture page from time to time. After fine tuning these campaigns, I must say that both 7Search and google are my favorites. When looking at actual sales, Google does beat 7Search by a 30% margin (which means that the actual cost per sale is about the same - not pictured on chart above), but both work extremely well.
As you can see, if I just looked at the cost per click but ignored conversions, I could have wasted a lot of money on the wrong vehicles.
The lesson here is - clicks are good, but conversion and sales are even better! Take the time to gather deeper information on all aspects of your advertising vehicles. If you do, your marketing dollars will bring you five to ten times better returns.
The article is brought to you by Peter Grundner at P&T Enterprises.
Pete Grundner
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/which-search-engines-work-best-a-pay-per-click-study-121978.html
Posted in number one on search engines
Do you think Google search results are trustful?
I’m university student in Japan and studying about Google Inc.
I was wondering, "How do they decide search results?" "What is their algorithm?"
I studied about this, and found some weired thing about google.
First, only few employees know Google algorithm.
Second, some companies were kicked out from the search results even they were not illegal.
Third, some words cannot put in search-box in China due to political problems.
a great number of people using Google search engine and they click at the top of results with no doubt.
If Google control their search results,,,
"Are Google search results really trustful?"
I doesn’t have so many knowledge, so let me know your opinions.
VEry good resource. I do collections find people that owe money on loans and things. We used google all the time to track down the people that own money to the company.
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yes it is trust worth
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Depends where you look. If you look at the paid listings on top of the page and to the right. No, not really. These people just bid the most money to get listed on top. It is called pay per click advertising.
The listings just below the paid ones, YES, they are trust worthy. To be listed top in Google organic listings, many factors on a site need to match your search in order to appear. You are right, Google antilogarithms are kept secret. There are methods called SEO, search engine optimization, that use known proven factors that will help a site to get indexed and listed well. If done right, the site will be found in the search results AND they are relevant.
Here is a bit of an article I wrote on SEO:
Without optimizing your site for good search engine ranking, our web business is like a mall built in the middle of the rain forest. Nobody can find you! If you built your website in the middle of the jungle (and that’s what the world wide web basically is), you will need some good traffic signs to get people to come visit. You can have the most beautiful website there is, but if nobody can find you? How much business will you get?
But what exactly is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Natural listings are the ones that appear in search results without any pay per click cost to you.
Read more in my source link below if you wish to learn more….
References :
http://duda-inc.com/seo-explained
I found that if you use the element search engine instead of google or yahoo it works the best. It combines google and ask. By the way, in that search engine, you can win prizes as you get points just for using it.
check it out
http://element.searchpluswin.com/?cmd=sb...
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