How share, loyalty and category affect search marketing strategies

Market share isn’t the only factor to consider in which search engines should be part of an online paid search campaign. Consumers’ loyalty to one engine or another also can play a role, particularly for category-specific queries, according to Greg Saks, director of the search practice at online market research company Compete Inc.

Among other data-gathering, Compete uses its 2 million-member panel of Internet consumers to track search engine market share and loyalty. It assigns a monthly loyalty score to different engines based on how many times a user who has searched on the engine at least once during the month returns to conduct additional searches.

For example, Google has maintained the highest loyalty score over the past several months. Its January score of 71.5% -- meaning that the average person who used Google for search at least once during the month actually did 71.4% of all their Internet searches that month on Google – rose to 72.4% in April. Google also consistently has a higher share of searches than any other engine overall, ranging from a 58.57% share in January to a 60% share in March.

But even though it has the highest overall rate of user loyalty and the highest overall market share, applying the filter of a specific category changes the picture and demonstrates that conducting a campaign on one engine, even one that gets the most searches, won’t reach what may be a significant audience that habitually searches for that category elsewhere.

“Not all queries are relevant to the business you are operating,” says Saks. “We can look at queries that relate to a certain industry or behavior, and see how those searches are being distributed and how loyal consumers are to that search activity.”

For example, Google’s market share on travel-related searches was 55% in February and its loyalty score on travel queries was 92%. Yahoo’s market share on travel queries was 31% and its loyalty score in the travel category was 87%.

“If I’m a marketer buying a lot of travel search terms, what I want to know is whether I can get exposure to most of the audience I want by just buying Google. But what we’ve seen is the average person who does even one travel search on Yahoo, will do 87% of all their travel searches on Yahoo. There is no other way to reach the 31% of the travel search market that is on Yahoo by not advertising on Yahoo,” says Saks. “You can’t just figure that at some point those Yahoo users will hop over to Google or another engine, because 87% of the time, they are going to devote their travel search queries to the Yahoo engine.”