LeeAnn Prescott at Efficient Frontier said the best performance in terms of traffic quality at the three biggest search engines belongs to Microsoft and its MSN/Live search properties.

To borrow a concept from Valleywag (with profuse apologies), here’s the sub-100-word version of Prescott’s blog post at Efficient Frontier about Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, pure search, and conversions:

Yahoo and Google display search ads on syndicate sites, while Microsoft keeps its search ads to itself, save a few placements displayed within *.msn.com sites. Based on their research, Efficient Frontier found pure search clicks and conversions at MSN reflect the generally high search intent of its visitors. This gives them higher quality traffic overall.

Prescott’s idea holds that the syndicated network ad placements by Google and Yahoo don’t convert as well as search traffic, a concept borne out by her research. “Pure search traffic converts better than syndicated search traffic,” she wrote.

Also, as Search Engine Land observed in the Efficient Frontier data, Yahoo shows awful conversions on its directly-owned search properties.  Only 45 percent of conversions tracked by Efficient Frontier for the first week of May for Yahoo came from its properties, with the rest coming from syndicates. People aren’t giving Yahoo’s search ads the clicks, it seems.

Posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:39 am. Permalink