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RKG helps retailers bring qualified traffic to their sites via large scale paid search campaigns. (We also help retailers improve site conversion via page redesign and multivariate testing, but this post is about PPC.)

For over a year, we’ve been reporting our aggregate agency spend going to each engine.

Expressing share in percentage terms removes seasonality and our agency’s growth from the statistic.

The bulk of our clients are online retailers, with a heavy emphasis on B2C.

Most of our client buy clicks from a direct response perspective — not so much interest in branding, and unlimited budget for clicks which meet their performance threshold.

Here are our March data:

paid search market share march 2008 google yahoo microsoft graph

[table]

While some clients establish strict monthly spend limits, they’re in the minority; more clients budget by performance.

So, our portfolio bid optimization algorithm and our search analysts usually don’t pay much attention to a priori budgets by engine.

We don’t usually care which engine gets how much ad spend. What we do care about is getting as many high-converting clicks for our clients that we can.

So what about last month?

March was another month where, in aggregate, Google took another tiny slice of the pie away from Yahoo.

This continues a slow but steady trend we’ve been watching for some time.

Link: earlier posts on same topic

Link: All Clicks Aren’t Created Equal: Q&A With Danny Sullivan over at SEL

Standard disclaimer: these data represent just our agency’s experience, and may not generalize beyond online retail. Your mileage may vary.

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Comments

  1. Chris Zaharias, April 4, 2008:

    It’s always good when SEMs put aggregate data out there; Comscore’s data is simply too risky to put blind faith in.

    Would I be right to assume this is a >$25M/qtr same size?

    Cheers,
    Chris

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