What percent of your traffic is from Yahoo?

Yahoo sending far fewer visitors than Google

[tumr]

I'm wondering about this, because I've always gotten most of my traffic from Google. Yahoo barely makes a dent - it sends perhaps 1.5-2% of my overall traffic, whereas Google sends the rest (am ignoring direct links, referrals in these stats). If Google has 62% of the search market and Yahoo has 20.5%, this gives me the sense that I'm "underperforming" on Yahoo. What do you all think?

[DjSonic]

yes you are under performing on yahoo. it's the same case with me also... i get all of my search engine traffic from google, yahoo and msn are pretty low to me too.

[Lexur]

Yahoo! never had this performance in the search market. Maybe in the early ages of "the Internet" Yahoo! had a 20% of traffic (and so around a 3-5% in the search market). Ten years ago, Yahoo! could send more traffic because directories, internal search and referral links had very much value until Google came to the web and the standard usage changed from browse to search online.

Just now, Yahoo! could have around a 3-5% of the global traffic (including news, email, answers, search and so on) and it gives them around a 1,5-2,5% of the search market.

And that's talking about the US market. In the rest of the world, Yahoo! is just another portal more with zero relevance in search local markets. Actually, i.e., in Spain Google dominates the search engine marketing with an incredible percentage: 94.

[makemetop]

In the rest of the world, Yahoo! is just another portal more with zero relevance in search local markets.

Tell that to people in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore etc., etc - and for PPC, in Korea (via Naver). Figures in excess of 90% for Yahoo's market share.

In the early days of the internet, Yahoo accounted for a lot more than 20% share of search and did until they started using Google as their crawled results search provider - complete with a "provided by Google" link and Google logo. I bet they regret that today!

[Elsmarc]

I'm in the same 'boat'. Almost all my traffic is from Google searches (I don't do AdWords or advertising like that). I don't worry about Yahoo or MSN, though. I look at long term growth in traffic/referrals from all sources. And when I say long term, I have data going back to about 2001. Some months are up, some months are down, but the trend every year of total traffic has been, and continues to be, up.

[robzilla]

The sites I own that are properly indexed by Yahoo get a decent amount of traffic, but it's getting in there that seems to be the biggest hurdle nowadays. For example, one site gets about 40% of its search traffic from Google, and 35% from Yahoo. Interestingly, the number of keywords the site receives Yahoo search traffic from is twice the number of keywords used in Google searches, so there's a much bigger variety of words and phrases that the site's pages are returned for. As for some other sites, they only get their homepage crawled every now and then and don't rank for anything. It's hit and miss with Yahoo.

[BillyS]

We get around 14% of our traffic from Yahoo and 78% from Google.

[tumr]

Thanks everyone. It seems that some people doubt the "20%" line, but this is from recent global comscore data ( [comscore.com...] ). I suppose that my low Yahoo turnout could be due to the fact that my visitors don't represent a global mix, but instead are largely from the US.

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:08 am (utc) on Oct. 20, 2008]
[edit reason] Added link to the original source. [/edit]

[Lexur]

The Comscore report talks about searches un Youtube, eBay, Facebook and so on. For me, that's not search but internal seach and I will never receive a click from a search in eBay; so, for me, that's not search. The internar search box of every forum is "search"?

By the way, you in the USA, call "the world series" to your local baseball league and Comscore calls "global" to the sum of his data from the US market. In the rest of the world, global means "for the whole world".

And finally: yes, Yahoo! has a small/tiny fraction of the search market.

[tumr]

Comscore does do global surveys, although the value that gets picked up by the US media is, understandably, the value that is relevant to US consumers.

Thank you for your points and insight re: distinguishing internal search vs true search, and the meaning of this distinction as it pertains to the impact of Yahoo traffic.

[angiolo]

I agree with makemetop!

I would underline another important point:

Yahoo visitors seems having a better ROI.
I think it's still very important to rank fine on yahoo!

[piatkow]

I haven't looked at the stats in detail for a while but basically

1. Google (including AOL) - over 90 % of search engine traffic and the great majority of all traffic
2. Followed links
3. Bookmarked / direct entry
4. Yahoo
5. MSN

[jitendraag]

I have tried yahoo for serps as well as for yahoo search marketing. I must say that even for terms for which I rank the same on yahoo and google, yahoo fails to send even 2% traffic. For ads the per click amount is slightly less for yahoo but those guys never place any orders :)

[night707]

80% Google, 16% live, 3,9% var, 0,1% yahoo image search

yahoo looks dead :-)

[cabowabo]

If I remove my PPC traffic from Yahoo!, my organic traffic is 4-6%. Yahoo! Organic is getting as bad as Ask it seems.

[tigger]

I have a site number 1 on Y but 20th on G and the G ranking is the one that sends me the bulk. Y really does seem to have lost its way

[minnapple]

It is a shame that a series of management team's accomplishments were taking a great brand and driving it down into the toilet. Yawho?

[cabowabo]

Not quite on the same level, but Yahoo's decline reminds me of how Disney killed Infoseek with just stupid ideas.

[mcneely]

In the rest of the world, global means "for the whole world" ..

Irony then;

It could depend on your market, so different results appear under just what it is you are trying to do on the net.

Have a go at this one:

In Australia, for some of the markets we target, NineMSN beats out the Google (70/30), while in the US, those same targeted markets produce a 25/75 split between Google and Yahoo (Yahoo being the 25%)

I posted a bit ago on how Google might favour tech over retail, and in the US, and possibly, the UK, this is true, at least for us.
But in Australia, Sensis turns out the ROI that Google somehow fails to do on that end.

In the US, it's mostly the big 3, Yahoo, Google, and MSN. But with us, there are a few others that are worth working up, worldwide. Looking at the larger picture with regard to search, and how it relates to ROI, helps to put the US search endices much more into perspective.