mdibb.co.uk

If you visit just about any forum on the web that covers the topic of Search Engine Optimisation (i.e. SEO) or even just web development in general, you’ll find most people are totally obsessed with Google to the exclusion of all other search engines, working themselves up into a frenzy of anger or excitement depending on how the most recent Page Rank or Index changes has affected their sites.

Fair enough - a good ranking in Google is still important, but people are probably missing out on a large source of revenue by simply concentrating on Google alone.

ClickThrough rates from the top search engines

I’ve been running advertising on some of my sites for some time now, and thanks to the excellent Google Analytics service I can get a nice break down of where users came from.

So, I decided to have a look at the figures for the last 6 months of my most popular site (about cars and fuel economy etc) - I think you’ll find the results fairly interesting.

Google is wallowing down in 5th place with only about 10% of visitors from Google clicking on an advert, whilst at the top we have just under a quarter of AOL users clicking, and a similar figure for MSN. I checked again with some of my other sites that don’t get quite the same high CTR that this one does, but the trend was still there and still very obvious - visitors from Google are a lot less likely to click on adverts.

Interestingly, AOL search displays the same results as a Google search (they use Google so that’s not surprising really!) but it would seem that AOL users are significantly more inclined to click on adverts.

Wikipedia isn’t great either!

Whilst looking at the statistics, I had a look at the amount of advert clicks that came from visitors who had come from Wikipedia. Its a widely held belief that Wikipedia links are worth their weight in gold due to the highly-targeted nature of the traffic.

I guess Wikipedia links might help making your site stand out from the others, but only a measly 5.8% of visitors from Wikipedia bothered to click an advert!

So what can we learn from all of this? The most important thing is probably not to just follow the crowd in a relentless pursuit of Google Page Rank, but to think about where the most profitable visitors are coming from! If nothing else the market for SEO with MSN and Yahoo is probably much less saturated than with everyone and his dog trying to manipulate Google.