The conversion rate of major search engines’ advertising

When it comes to key e-commerce metrics, who do you think offers the most bang for your buck?

It’s usually a matter of trying each major search engine for yourself and analyzing the click ratios but this one time Websidestory, an analytics company, has done it for us and their work shows that ads on AOL and MSN appear to be far more effective those on Google and Yahoo! at driving sales.

For the number crunchers, here’s a view of the median order conversion rate (MOCR) by these major search engine at B2C e-commerce web sites, for the month of January 2006 (for all categories):

• AOL 6.17%
• MSN 6.03%
• Yahoo! 4.07%
• Google 3.83%

Anything over 5% means very nice conversion ratios so the fact AOL and MSN actually go over 6% says a lot about the quality of their intended audience, from an advertiser’s perspective.

Some experts see a major draw for visitors in “shopping mode” in the AOL and MSN rich portals as opposed to a higer percentage of selective web surfers (non-shoppers) in the Google-like engines. Some may consider this type of observation as overly simplified, considering the complex interactions going on when a user searches content online.

It’s important to note the results for this study includes traffic from both organic and paid keywords.

All in all, these major search engines shouldn’t be scared to lose their ad revenues because the median average for all search engines, was a mere 1.97%, for the month of January 2006.

If you want more details about this study, Mr Stephen Baker from BusinessWeek has published a comprehensive review you may want to read.

Where will you spend your precious online ad budget next?