I was doing some reading and came across an interesting conclusion by the author…

He claimed that while most of his visitors came from Google, they were far less “valuable” then visitors from some other engines (he used MSN as a specific example).

He defined “valuable” using a sales/unique visitor ratio. For example he found that  for every 500 visitors Google sent his way he sold 1 item. However he would also sell 1 item for every 100 visitors that came from MSN (I’m making these figures up as I can’t remember his exact example).

Now I don’t sell anything from my sites nor do I analyze my traffic with that degree of depth (though I should and would like to at least once in a while) but I found his conclusion very fascinating and was wondering if any of you came across similar results?

I have a GUT FEEL he is right.

In fact at one stage Yahoo was touted as the shoppers search engine

Google is too focused on e-commerce (onlineshopping), amazon and directories, before on wikipedia and ebay.
The Google search-results do not really take care about the needs of the user.
Even if there´s personalised search,... Google.de comes up with forums, blogs and social bookmarksites in its results. Blogs do often fail my needs. The searchfunctions do not work correct and the sites are too long. Even if I search with the internal browser search I cannot find any relevant content for my searchterm. I´ve got problems with the forums, because many people do not really take care or even know what they´re writing. And it´s normal that you don´t get answers on your questions.  At least what is the sin on listing entries in directories? Clickitis? It can take hours to find the right website these days on google.
They should do one step back and serve quality serch results instead of web2.0 flicks.
...or should I look for an alternative ?

(off topic?)

I've not noticed that with specific SEs, but it doesn't surprise me.

What i did find was with alexa:

For my jvmembers site, the alexa rank was in the top 100,000
For a company I now work for who have many 1000s times more visitors per day, alexa rank is un registered.

This, I put down to the type of business - jvmembers is about running websites and advertising, the company i work for now is all about adrenaline sports. Problem is, even though I'm the SEO guy, I'm still finding it difficult to get my hands on the log files....

yea Alexa is bit of a joke...my "Site A" is ranked 10 times better then my "Site B" and receives about 1 quater of the traffic...still so many people put so much emphasize on it that it's nice to have a high ranks

anywho back to the original thought...the underlining statement the author makes is that people who use different SE have different buying tendencies....

which leads me to a few questions

i use Google exclusively (because i have it in my toolbar and i can't handle having more then 1 toolbar) - thats unless looking at my rankings on other SE's)- do you guys use different SE's for different types of searches?

If not and people are creatures of habits what kind of people use different SE's? I  thought i read an article once that usggested Google was more for tech people and Yahoo/MSN for the less internet savy person (the type of person that never bothered to change MSN as their homepage when they bought a computer for example). Think there is truth behind this?

I personally use the big three depending on what I am looking for. msn is my primary and when I am looking for something specific. Yahoo, when I am considering online purchasing, and then google.  I use google when I want a broader non-specific search result.

Google searches IMHO have a tendency to be a lot looser on the search terms, which brings up a  lot of sites that are not relevant to my search because they have one or two phrases similar to my search words.

Nic wrote:

i use Google exclusively (because i have it in my toolbar and i can't handle having more then 1 toolbar) - thats unless looking at my rankings on other SE's)- do you guys use different SE's for different types of searches?

Nic, with the theme I use with FF I have a drop down box at the end of my address bar. Yo can add as many search engines as you want.

I don't ike the way Yahoo lists the same sites  several times in search results

Nics statement is true. Yahoo offers a portal in multiple languages with various services like free-mail, news,...
One example: My friends girlfriend comes from argentinia and lives in vienna. She´s always visiting Yahoo-argentinia, because they´re offering a wide range of local information. I guess she does even searches throught the Yahoo searchengine.

When I land on Yahoo, I can´t resist and read some Newslines or articles. Sometimes I watch a movie or so.

Regarding google: See my opinion above. I mean it´s all about search. That´s not bad and the top-reason why I am using it. Its simple frontend and advertising-free search-mask is attractive and I tend to use search-enginges only for searching specific words or phrases(mostly technical).

On the whole, I think it's a secular like this:

web newbies use google - it's the most famous
newbies and lazy people - yahoo; everythings there in one place
net savvy - yahoo and google
experts - all 3.

The market share that Yahoo and MSN have in the UK is a lot smaller than in the US, because of the portal style - all the extra crap on the front pages is targeted at a US market. Absolutely none of it is relevant to UK residents.

The neutrality of google makes it a winner in the UK

I have used Yahoo and Google search engines pay per click programs.  My results were such that I cancelled my Yahoo account after only 3 weeks, paying more than 3 dollars for a click that generated no revenue threw my small marketing budget on a down turn spiral really fast.

Google has given me better results, 90% of my current customers have found me using their pay per click program and bought something. The analytics tools in Google are absolutely awesome as well as the keyword look up tools, conversion tracking tools etc.

My website is new so I am working on a daily basis on it and on marketing it as much as possible until it get's some attention from the big three's organic search methods.

I have not tried MSN's advertising, does anyone have any experience with it?

What I sell is limited to the transportation industry specially owner operators, I don't really know what search engine would work best...

We do not use PPC or any other  pay program.  Google browsers for the most part are  look see, waste your bandwidth. Yahoo and MSN seem to have the more serious buyers. In our case most of our custom is Female between 25 - 40. 

Google and MSN do have the highest ratio of " image" viewers. They also seem to have an " appreciation" for sexy pictures.

Specific target marketing makes the world of difference.

Hope this helps someone

ColoEagle wrote:

Nic, with the theme I use with FF I have a drop down box at the end of my address bar. Yo can add as many search engines as you want.
http://www.providerofchoice.net/images/ … search.jpg

Just curious - why would you have that in your FF bar?

Nic wrote:

I was doing some reading and came across an interesting conclusion by the author…

He claimed that while most of his visitors came from Google, they were far less “valuable” then visitors from some other engines (he used MSN as a specific example).

He defined “valuable” using a sales/unique visitor ratio. For example he found that  for every 500 visitors Google sent his way he sold 1 item. However he would also sell 1 item for every 100 visitors that came from MSN (I’m making these figures up as I can’t remember his exact example).

Now I don’t sell anything from my sites nor do I analyze my traffic with that degree of depth (though I should and would like to at least once in a while) but I found his conclusion very fascinating and was wondering if any of you came across similar results?

I have not seen any stats that scream MSN. I took a quick peek at some early morning stats/goals and all of the conversions came from Google, but I also want to note that direct referrals had goal %.

                                 Visits   PVisit    Goals>>>
    Source  Totals:  2,497  3.85       0.40%  0.40%  0.40%  0.40% 

1. google[organic]  1,332  3.73      0.23%  0.23%  0.23%  0.23% 

2. (direct)[(none)]  416  3.74           0.96%  0.96%  0.96%  0.96% 

3. yahoo[organic]  254  4.68           0.00%  0.00%  0.00%  0.00% 

4. msn[organic]  127  4.59             0.00%  0.00%  0.00%  0.00% 

5. aol[organic]  68  3.19                  1.47%  1.47%  1.47%  1.47%   

5. aol[organic]  68  3.19  1.47%  1.47%  1.47%  1.47%