comScore recently released April 2011search engine rankings report. This report shows overall market share / usage of the top search engines.
Here is the recap in order of usage:
- Google search market share fell to 65.4 percent, a loss of .3 percent in March.
- Yahoo grew to 15.9 percent, a gain of .2 percent.
- Bing grew to 14.1 percent, a gain of .2 percent.
- Ask fell to 3 percent, a loss of .1 percent.
- AOL fell to 1.5 percent, a loss of .1 percent.
The graph below shows search query’s in millions. Americans conducted more than 18.0 billion total core search queries in April. Google Sites ranked first with 11.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.5 billion according to comScore.
Source: comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011
Most of the customers I consult with have been content running on the Google network alone, however the data above shows that limiting yourself to one network is only allowing you 65.4% coverage. This means that they are missing 34% of potential customers/clients/or patients. I always recommend we run all tier one search engines and allocate the budget appropriately, this way we have the broadest reach and will be available to 98% of the searches conducted.
With this in mind, Chris has the ability to provide accurate data as it relates to the conversions (CBO – Conversion based optimization) that come from each search engine independently, and he is able to move money between engines providing less impact to those that have better results. Often times those customers that were just running on Google get far better results from other engines. This is just one more reason that running your program with the largest provider of local internet search to SMB’s in the United States just makes sense. Chris can provide you solutions that small boutiques can’t touch.