More and more advertisers are switching on to the power of search advertising and how it can work for them, but with the current worries about the economy, advertisers are more aware of things like value and ROI. Search is obviously a very good medium in this respect, as the cost per click model avoids a lot of potential wastage in terms of views that don’t become leads. However, even taking that into account, there is still a degree of low-value spend – specifically, consumers who click on a paid search link but then don’t convert.
This degree varies by search engine, and the latest figures from Nielsen provide some interesting reading:
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.
*- Using NNR Jan-March 2008 data showing how many clickthroughs from each search engine go to secure pages on the destination sites.
Also, a couple of weeks ago we held an event for advertisers interested in learning more about search and the retail vertical.
You can check out the agenda and presentations here: Microsoft adCenter Retail Event
To coincide with the day we've launched a knowledge centre - adCenter For Retail - to help our advertisers with their retails PPC campaigns.
No matter how well your campaigns are running, there is always room for improvement.
adCenter For Retail is designed to help you go that one step further and enable you to optimise your adCenter retail campaign by providing bidding advice, targeting tricks, increasing relevancy tips and keyword libraries.
In addition you can view retail trends to understand what profiles of people are clicking and when - then fine tune your campaigns accordingly. Plus browse the research articles to give you insights about our highly engaged audience and top conversion rates.