How To Compare ROI Between Search Engines

Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 13 of June , 2008 at 7:46 am

(Source) On average, 4% of clickthroughs* from a search engine results page lead to conversions – that’s about 1 in every 25 clicks. This differs by search engine, and rises to 7.5% on Live Search; in other words, 1 in every 13 click throughs goes through to a conversion. In fact, when we look at clickthroughs from Live Search to retail sites, that rises to 1 in every 5 clickthroughs going through to a conversion, massively increasing the value of your search ad and increasing the ROI.

These are stats that search advertisers should pay attention to. If your conversion rate is lower than 7.4% on MSN adCenter or 4% on Google then you might want to take a look at your ads and landing pages to find out why. One overarching question is, Why does MSN adCenter seem to have a better conversion rate?

Keep in mind that you’ll have a lot fewer click throughs on MSN adCenter. The traffic is nowhere near where it is on Google. So that 4% conversion rate might actually mean more total conversions. On the other hand, you’ll be paying more for clicks too. These are considerations you’ll need to consider when judging your ROI.

Here’s an illustration that might help:

For every 100 clicks throughs you’ll have 7.4 conversions from MSN adCenter, but you’ll only have 4 conversions from Google. Those clicks might cost you 5 cents on average at MSN adCenter and 25 cents on average at Google. If you make $10 per sale after expenses from each unit sold then your total intake from your MSN adCenter conversions amounts ot $74 and from Google, $40. Your click through payouts are .50 and $2.50, respectively. It might seem like a no-brainer and that MSN adCenter has a slam dunk just considering these figures, but you also need to take into considering the length of time it takes to reach these numbers.

If you consider that it could take 10 times longer to reach the 100 click throughs on MSN adCenter than it does on Google then you could reach that 100 click throughs in 1 week at Google compared to 10 weeks at MSN adCenter. That means you’ll earn an ROI of $37.50 per week at Google, but $7.35 per week at MSN adCenter.

While these figures might not be realistic in terms of what you should expect at each search engine, they do reflect the kind of mathematical thinking required to figure your ROI at each search engine and encourage you to compare apples to apples.

                      Category: Google Adwords, Microsoft Ad Center, PPC Management                      

No comments yet.