You Can Improve Your Conversion Rate by Targeting at Source
Segmenting prospects is core to much of what we do as marketers to communicate value propositions to small, homogeneous groups in order to achieve higher than average conversion rates – and segmenting prospects by the search engine they come from is no different.
New research from comScore reflects that Google doesn’t just dominate the search market by a large margin; its users are also more loyal and more inclined to search in general than Yahoo and Microsoft searchers.
So marketers need to take note of the differences in their web traffic based on the selected search engine – and track conversion rates separately for each group. Most likely, the data will surprise you.
The highlights, according to comScore include:
• Google holds 84% of the overall search market.
• In contrast, recently-allied rivals Microsoft and Yahoo enjoy combined search penetration of 73%.
• Google searchers conduct an average of 54.5 searches per month — double the number of searches of Microsoft and Yahoo users combined (26.9 times a month).
• So-called “Googlers” are also more loyal. 70% of their searches occur on Google products.
• Yahoo and Microsoft users demonstrate significantly less fidelity, searching on either a Microsoft or Yahoo product 33% of the time — and also using Google heavily
At present, Google holds about 65% of the US core search market. Yahoo and Microsoft hold 28% (this figure was boosted in part by the popularity of recently-launched Bing, which gifted parent company Microsoft with a small search rankings boost in June. It remains to be seen if the trend will continue).
Tools like Omniture Test & Target do an excellent job at targeting traffic by source but even if you don’t have access to turbo-charged tools like it, through ‘sneaker power’ and your web analytics tool, you can determine if there are differences in web visitor behavior based on the search engine they came from – and take action.
The increase in conversion rates will most likely make the effort worth it.
