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Each month we report paid search share among our clients.

We take our aggregate spend on Google, Yahoo, and MSN across all RKG clients and show how it breaks down by month, by engine. (Search and Content combined, but the data is heavy on Search) In addition, since advertising spend is set on economic goals and not engine favored, this approach removes search engine bias, seasonality and RKG growth. In other words, the allocation of spend reflects availability of quality clicks on each engine, and we’re using relative proportions.

May 2008 results: steady, no big change.

paid search engine advertising market share trend

Google @ 80.8%
Yahoo @ 14.5%
MSN @ 4.7%

Google’s at ~81% because their clicks work. As for market share, no big change YTD.

Here’s a glimpse at CPCs across our client base for the month.

cost per click cpc google yahoo may 2008

The results: Google earns more per click.

Next, CPC trend by month, indexed so google = 100%. (This removes seasonality and RKG growth.)

cost per click trend search engine click quality

Pretty stable. Google consistently has 10 to 20% higher CPC than Yahoo, MSN.

CPM (cost per thouand imps) for May across our clients:

effection CPM eCPM paid search google yahoo microsoft may 2008

MSN actually earns more per imp than Google, though on far far far fewer imps and clicks (our clients in aggregate bought 14 times as many clicks on Google vs MSN in May).

Trend in eCPM, indexed so G = 100% to remove seasonality and RKG growth:

eCPM trend paid search google yahoo microsoft monetization

Reveals that as we buy more traffic from MSN, we see eCPM decreasing.

Stay tuned for next month’s post!

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