The Power of a Brand - Perception vs. Reality
"Survey: Advertisers Say Search Ads On Google Better Than Yahoo, MSN"
That’s the headline from a MediaPost article about a recent survey of 1200 PPC advertisers conducted by Outsell.
"About 71 percent of respondents said that search ads on Google were effective, compared to 62 percent who considered search ads on Yahoo effective and 49 percent who thought MSN search ads were effective."
However, a little farther down you find this:
"But when Outsell looked more closely at the results, it found that the most enthusiastic Google fans also had the smallest marketing budgets. The average marketing budget of respondents who rated Google "extremely" effective totaled $3.7 million. But average budgets for those who considered Yahoo and MSN extremely effective came to $4.6 million."
So advertisers with smaller budgets think Google’s the best, while advertisers with larger budgets think Yahoo and MSN are better. Obviously, all advertisers polled are advertising on all three systems, so what could cause such a split in opinion?
I didn’t conduct the survey, so I can’t say for sure, but I would bet it has to do with whether or not the advertiser being polled actually spent any time tracking conversions. The sad reality is that most PPC advertisers don’t do proper conversion tracking. The few advertisers who do allocate resources to proper conversion tracking tend to be advertisers who have large budgets.
That being the case, if you poll a company with a large budget and a quality tracking system, you are probably going to get an answer based on cold, hard facts. And those facts (from my personal experience) have always shown that Yahoo and MSN win hands down. (Regardless of the size of the budget).
On the other hand, if you poll a company who has never actually tracked conversion, you are much more likely to get an answer based on feelings. And when it comes to how advertisers feel about a company, no one can compete with Google.
Brand loyalty is a powerful thing. It has the ability to drastically distort our perception of reality. And that in turn, can cause us to waste a ton of money. If you are one the thousands of people in PPC land blindly managing your company’s monthly spend, I would strongly urge you to take the time to find out the truth. Completely forget about what you think or feel works, and be open to the idea that your current perceptions could be completely wrong. If you are willing to do that, you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
Comments
6 Responses to “ The Power of a Brand - Perception vs. Reality ”
Sounds plausible, but USD 3.7 million vs USD 4.6 million does not seem to be significant enough to account for such a difference in attitudes.
Those who spend 3 or 4 million will not care (and base their decisions on emotions, even though this amount of money is quite large already) - but suddenly, those who spend 5 million turn out to be coldly rational?
Having managed budgets of that size, I’d definitely choose Google over YSM (nee Overture) any day simply because of the greater level of control Google offers. I was able to get much better conversion rates on Google because I could more effectively isolate very specific keywords and bid on those accordingly.
I can see where there might be industries where few very specific keywords get enough searches to make isolation worthwhile, but for the ones that do, Google wins hands down for me.
(And I’m looking forward to getting a chance to try out the new MSN.)
Greg - yeah, same experience here, whether it’s a million-dollar-a-month budget or a thousand, we’ve found that ROI and conversion rates from YSM are almost always better that Google.
I have another theory about why bigger advertisers like Yahoo!, though - I think they’re feeling more value from the “short tail”, while Google advertisers (the smaller guys) are getting more “long tail” love. It’s a demographic and user trend thing - Yahoo! and MSN are the homepages for a lot of folks, and they do their first search there. If they need to get more specific or are unhappy with the results, they jump over to Google to do more “long tail”, in-depth type searches.
Just a guess, but it’s a trend I see all the time in user behavior and something that folks like ComScore also note in their reports.
Sorry to leave you a blog entry instead of a comment - Should really save the content for somewhere more visible
Hi Greg,
I manage a large PPC budget. We track and measure results very carefully. Our strategy is to manage the program to an average cost to revenue ratio % so the campaign that generates the most revenue will be scaled up and keywords added for extra traffic and volume until it maxes out. If it’s not performing well, we eliminate the non performing keywords and adjust the bids until it meets the minimum standard. The best performer is consistently Google. Yahoo! is second, MSN is third and all the other PPC programs have been tested but eliminated because they didn’t perform.
Yahoo Search Marketing (née Overture) vs. Google AdWords
Greg Boser (aka WebGuerrilla) commented yesterday on a recent Media Post article reporting that PPC advertisers with larger budgets preferred Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, née Overture) and MSN over Google:
But when Outsell looked more closely at the …
I think you’re close to the truth here, but its not just about “feeling” its also about site usability. Google has the easiest to use PPC program management interface, hands down.