Difference Between Google and Yahoo Users?

After working on a number of campaigns for both search engines, I noticed that right from the very first week of a campaign’s launch, you can definitely pick out the differences between visitors to the website from Google versus Yahoo.  It seems like Google users are much more straight forward with higher click conversions.  On the other hand, although Yahoo users do drive more traffic due to their much cheaper CPC  (cost-per-click), the click conversions are lower with users that are likely to be just looking for information.

An article shedding some light on this behaviour is one by Gerry McGovern on “The Real Difference Between Google and Yahoo“.

In it, he suggested that

Yahoo’s customer is the advertiser. Google’s customer is you and me.

I couldn’t agree more. Though Yahoo had a head start in this Search Engine game, somehow Yahoo began to put the advertiser first. It stopped seeing customers as people it needed to help find what they wanted quickly. Both Yahoo and Google have the same advertising model. However, Google got it right by focusing on increasing relevance for the customer instead of increasing page views and ad placements.

This divergence in approach between Yahoo and Google seems to be one of the factors in how users respond to ads on the two search engines.  This insight could be important in how we tailor our SEM campaigns to our clients’ requirements. We would be able to mix and match the allocation of budget to the search engines depending on which stage of the buying cycle we want to focus on – be it in the fact finding/comparison stage or the purchase stage.