Where to spend your PPC pounds

If you are using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising to promote your business, you are probably focusing on the biggest search engines with the most "eyeballs": Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

Neilsen's MegaView Search Report (Dec 2004) analyses how users respond to and click on PPC advertising as a measure for success for UK search engines. When a searcher types in a keyword or phrase and look at the results, how often do they click on the advertising?

The results might surprise you.

Google has the highest number of searchers, and the highest click through rate, so no surprises there. But how about Tiscali? It is number 4 in terms of PPC performance, AltaVista is 3, and that rank outsider My Way Search is number 5. Yell doesn't appear until unlucky number 13 and Kelkoo is way down at 16.

What does this mean? Just because the search engine is big doesn't mean it is attracting the right audience for your product or service. The performance of your PPC on a search engine will vary according to a wide range of factors

The top 10 UK search engines ranked by number of click throughs per searcher:

1. Google Search
2. Yahoo! Search
3. AltaVista Search
4. Tiscali Search
5. My Way Search
6. MSN Search
7. Wanadoo Search
8. Lycos Search
9. Ask Jeeves Search
10. Dogpile.com Search