Forum Moderators: open
1. Google,
2. MSN,
3. Yahoo
4. Ask.
5. AOL. Lycos
which may be similar, US, UK, Germany, Spain etc with local Engines / directories generating more in specific locations.
However we are all talking about niche marketing to a greater or lesser extent... so what about the search results within
Consumer Markets:
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If I were doing online consumer marketing I would expect home ISPs which offer search solutions: e.g. ISPs in UK:
Freeserve, BT, AOL, NTL, Virgin, Onenet, Tesco etc
would deliver more searchers via their search solution for consumer products via their default homepage.
Thus for UK consumer marketers Overture pay for play would have suddenly become much more important as Freeserve have now started serving Overture results.
While for
Industrial marketing:
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The influence of directories such as ODP, filtering through many SE results and the influence of specific industrial dirctories and online magazines etc would be much greater and inward links could be driving a much greater proportion of arrivals.
Of course if I were marketing industrial AND consumer sites, which were ALL well placed in all engines and directories, I would aleady have this data in my log analysis and might not be discussing it in here :-0
However I have no idea where most people find online consumer eailing but am considering a consumer project so please share your experience.
I am interested in results by market sector not geographic location.
For example the site in my profile (which is still restrictive for SE in a number of important ways and has not paid for entry anywhere, so is way un-representative) gets an incoming hierarchy like:
Google
Lycos
Yahoo
AltaVista
Alltheweb
Mamma
And in the months where google seems to derate it slightly Lycos in the UK provides way more incomings than Google threatenning to overtake google overall.
It is definately not consumer oriented, and its results are irrelevant for sector analysis because it is ranked ok only in Google, and Lycos. In AV Atw or MSN the subject area might be possible to generate way more visits if it were well ranked, depending on the search solutions used by people in the target market.
For a number of fully industrial sites which had ok rankings and good inward links, I have experienced some directories and well ranked inward linking sites driving more inward traffic than many of the above SEs.
I am intersted in your experiences.
To be statistically rigorous will be impossible because a site would have to in some way have the same level of exposure in each engine / directory to see which returns the most visitors for that application sector.
For example where do searchers for consumer clothing go, I bet it is different to industrial supplies?
Of course all people are consumers after they leave their offices so they may stick with their favourite search when they get home but there is an increasing market who only use www search at home ... 10 million households in UK, how many in US, Continental Europe?
For folks interested in internet marketing we could start to work ROI calculations by comparing the cost of the time taken to ensure subject pages are compatible and get ranked in Google, Lycos, All the web, Altavista etc against the cost for inclusion in Overture, Yahoo directory MSN etc...
Comments welcome.
> Of course all people are consumers after they leave their offices so they may stick with their favourite search when they get home but there is an increasing market who only use www search at home ... 10 million households in UK,
10 million UK households are reportedly connected to the net, that will include an unknown proportion who are also connected at work.
I think that you over simplify the problem by highlighting only two different marketplaces.
I think there may be a wealth of marketplaces all with slightly different demographics.
Youth
Consumer
High Tech Industry
Other Industry
Finance, Law etc
Research/Scientific
More suggestions would be welcome.
Even within those categories there will be some blurring of boundaries.
An interesting exercise would be to look at the search engines to see which engines are targetting which markets.
Having had a look at the Jupiter Metrix results - I find it very difficult to believe that Google is so low down. My indication is that Google is significantly bigger in terms or referrals than anything other than MSN.
So not only is the number of users of interest but also the fact that I would guess that the average Google user makes significantly more searches than the average MSN or Ask user.
Could this be because your sites are perhaps well optimised for google and perhaps do not fare so well in others AltaVista, MSN, AOL etc plus how can we compare exposure to results in "free" se to paid Overture etc unless we can calculate some "same expenditure and exposure" model to compare 1 & 2 below and balance against 3.
1. Making SE compatible pages and sites.
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The cost of making sites and pages suitable to rank reasonably with spidering engines Google Altavisa, Lycos, et al .. and getting this placement.
2. The cost of obtaining suitable exposure via pay for placement services
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spending the same amount on exposure via Overture etc ...
3. The cost of making sites containing suitable effective communications resulting in a sales result
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Points 1 and 2 both assume that a site on arrival gives a suitably effective communication / commercial message for the offering - enabling conversion to take place.
Investment in Item 3 is not necessarily complimentary or compatible with investment into items 1 or 2.
Sorry Ian missed this.
Yes you are quite right, in fact the very definition of a "market niche" can include that marketers can in some way identify some unique characteristic of participants or their behaviour. It can be as simple as the application they have, the equipment they use (Mac Graphics anyone) or their preferred ISP / search solutions ..
So every niche market probably has a slightly different optimal Internet marketing communications mix.
I guess this is a more concise version of the start post :-)
Google works better for him. He is high in the SERPs for the generic phrases eg 'consumer item', but gets the vast majority of his traffic from thousands of different 2 and 3 word searches such as 'manufacturersname consumer item', 'consumer item modelname' etc
Although Google has cataloged more pages the results are way more than this would suggest.
My theory is that Google searchers are more likely to understand the value of three or more word searches, whereas MSN and AOL types are more likely to put in the first phrase that comes into their heads.
Just a thought
4eyes that is interesting.
I just started a new industrial site and had picked very specific two and three word key terms, we rank on pages 1-2 for almost all of these in google, but I have no reliable prediction on regularity of searches yet here or elsewhere... Time will tell.
Other free to enter engines / directories are yet to fully index or list that new site so I cannot tell much from them yet.
Plus no comparison to paid results on that site because we will start with results from them paying me (I much prefer this method anyhow :-) than them paying Overture and the like!
I am pleased about the key term focus because the client wants quality enquiries ONLY, are not set up for high volumes of email discussion which do not end in an order :-) (who is)
Interestingly as with many specialised companies there are absolutely NO single word keywords which would contain more than a tiny % of their target customers.
Cost benefit in this case is therefore simply not justified on most of these.
BACK TO THE TOPIC :-)
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So 4eyes you say Consumers are coming in well on google but is the site in question well ranked in AltaVista, Lycos, Fast Alltheweb etc free to enter engines?
Are they paying for Overture, Yahoo directory, MSN, Looksmart, and obtaining reasonable exposure .. because this could indicate some cost benefit for consumers compared to obtaining results from google.
They are well spidered and catalogued by all the free options, though.
The best comparison is with Alltheweb/Lycos where they have very similar results in ranking and pages catlogued
Google 9134
Lycos/Alltheweb 204
..over the same period.
Before we added optimised product pages the ratio was much lower.
Another variable that may be involved is the possibilty that some of the model names may be UK specific (I don't know for sure), whereas the generics are not.
