Search Engine User Difference?

Are Overture and Google End-Users Different?

[SClaw]

Firstly, I hope no one has answered this question previously. I have had a search around but I couldn’t see anything specifically covering this. If there is, I apologise for going over old ground.

My question is fairly simple; are the end-users (the searchers) of Overture based search engines and Google vastly different?

I know that’s a rather broad question, so I’ll try to put it into some context.

Some time ago I set up Overture account with around 40 terms and set them running. The performance was very poor with almost no clicks, though it wasn’t costing anything so I wasn’t too concerned. I eventually switched the account off and headed back to Adwords, which has always been quite good for me.

More recently I decided to try applying some of my Adwords gained PPC knowledge to Overture. I started up a test with a couple of terms, terms I’ve been using in Adwords with a great deal of success. This time around I got plenty of clicks at a very good price – I was pleased to see the improvement.

Unfortunately, while my Adwords click to sale ratio is around 10% my Overture ratio is just 1%. I’m very puzzled by this, because the ad text, terms and pages are almost exactly the same for both the Overture and Adwords accounts.

Is it just that people who use Overture based search engines are different from people who use Google? I have no idea why else the ratio would be so much different.

Can anyone shed some light onto this? Or perhaps at least sympathise if you’ve had similar experiences?

[steve]

Our main site serves UK businesses, it is geo-targetted and ads only show on search results.

Compared to Adwords - the number of impressions is much lower, the click ratio is slightly higher, but the conversion rate is much higher.

Do you supply businesses or consumers?

What age group do your customers fall into?

[aaronpaul]

The users of each engine are different. Different engines appeal to different demographics. Hitwise did a study a couple of months back about demographic profiles for the different engines. Here are a few of the stats from the study:

* Google users were 53.6 percent male.
* Ask Jeeves users were 58.7 percent female
* MSN Search had the highest proportion of users older than 55
* Google had the most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000.
* Google, Yahoo!, and MSN users tend to enter just one or two words in the search box. An average of 87 percent of searches at those three engines are two words or less.
* Ask Jeeves sends the largest proportion of searchers (8.55 percent) to business-related sites

If you would like a link to the entire study, just send me a private message, sticky message or whatever they call it here.

[SClaw]

Steve, we supply consumers. We are service industry, rather than selling physical products.

Our customers tend to be male, as an average early 30s to mid 40s across the business though I'm finding that a slightly higher percentage of our online business is from women of a similiar age range.

This is why I find your figures interesting, aaronpaul. It really does makes me wonder if Overture is simply serving the wrong marketplace for our services.

I'll certainly send you a message. Thank you for the offer, its bound to be good reading.

So my next question would be, have you found that copytext and site design have had a major impact on something as simple as the sex of the person who clicks your ad?