Search market share and query volume didn’t change much in April, 2009, but sponsored referrals at some of the leading search engines took a big hit.

Last month, query volume dipped a slight 5.4% at the leading search engines, and nearly all maintained their March market share. Concerns over Swine Flu, Opening Day at baseball parks across the country and buzz over Twitter weren’t enough to move the query dial into black.

However, amid discussions of a slow growth in sponsored referrals relative to query volume, Google’s rate of sponsored referrals dropped a sharp 0.6% in April, possibly attributable to search marketer cutbacks given the uncertain economy, as well as improved targeting from the search engines. Google maintained impressive 9+ billion queries or 73.3% of share.
Yahoo! also saw a sharp decrease in sponsored referral rate, falling to 6.3%, while query volume and market share were essentially flat. Again, improved targeting and economic conditions appear to be the cause.
Lastly, Ask saw a dramatic fall of 1.7pts to 4.5% rate of sponsored referrals, bringing it back to levels from a couple of months ago. Ask’s query volume and market share were essentially flat.

To recap, not much new in terms of query volume and market share, but sponsored referrals took a good lick in April, 2009.

• Google query volume dipped a slight 5.0% and market share stayed essentially flat at 73.3%. Meanwhile sponsored referral rate fell to 6.2%
• Yahoo! query volume and market share were essentially flat, while sponsored referral rate fell to 6.3%.
• MSN/Live hovered at 6.2% market share, while rate of sponsored referrals actually grew slightly.
• Ask maintained 2.4% share and a second tier rate of sponsored referrals at 4.5%.
• AOL slid slightly to 0.6% market share, continuing to 82 million searches in April.

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

If you’ve visited the homepages of Yahoo!, AOL or MSN in the past couple of months, you may have noticed some really big banner ads. The online publishing industry has been experimenting with new ad sizes and formats lately, and it’s led to some very eye catching advertising.

On the left is the ubiquitous “Medium Regular” banner ad that Kohl’s ran on the MSN homepage. On the right is the same ad, which ran on AOL in larger format.

As you might expect the larger ad got many more clickthroughs, even as a percentage of visitors who saw the ad. But so what? Kohl’s doesn’t want to sell page views to people who see their ads, they want to sell blenders. And that’s where the story gets interesting. You might not expect it, but the small ad actually performed 1.7 percentage points better in driving purchase.

Perhaps that’s not surprising because once someone clicked through either ad, they ended up on the same landing page. In other words, the larger ad drew the attention of more would-be shoppers, but the smaller ad found a greater concentration of motivated buyers.

Which ad size worked better? That depends on Kohl’s objective - were they after attention or conversion? Both ads demonstrated strength.

To speak with a sales representative about Compete’s Ad Impact post-buy analysis and advertising effectiveness studies, visit compete.com/adimpact or email adimpact@compete.com.

To read up on the latest trends in advertising effectiveness, visit blog.compete.com/adimpact.

Tracfone recently purchased a banner ad on the AOL homepage. This type of homepage ad is a go-to tactic for media buyers looking to drive lots of traffic, and hopefully sales, to their advertising clients.

However, it can often be difficult to tell just how effectively homepage ads perform. Clickthrough, the most common measure of ad effectiveness, doesn’t represent the full value of display advertising since many people who see the ad don’t click on it, but do visit the advertiser’s site afterwards.

There’s also the question of whether those people who visit an advertiser’s site would have gone anyway, regardless of whether or not they saw the ad.

To address these measurement challenges, Compete developed an advertising effectiveness solution for homepage ads on portals and other top publishers. It takes a panel of millions of consumers to measure advertising effectiveness on publisher homepages.

The chart above shows how Tracfone’s recent ad on the AOL homepage performed. It presents an index that compares visitors from an ad exposed group to a control group that was not exposed, but was otherwise identical.

People from the ad exposed group were 6.28 times more likely to visit Tracfone than control group in the same session as viewing the ad. That’s solid performance for Tracfone. By comparison, an ad on the AOL homepage from 1800Flowers.com delivered a 3.5x lift in visitation. (See our Valentine’s Day study.)

Plus, Compete.com’s Referral Analytics show that AOL delivered nearly 50% of referrals to Tracfone’s landing pages at tracfoneoffers.com.

AOL doubled down for Tracfone. The portal delivered strong homepage advertising results and proved strategically important to Tracfone’s customer acquisition strategy.

March typically posts some big month/month query volume growth, but last month exceeded all expectations. Query volume across the top 5 search engines skyrocketed 14.1% to just over 13 billion searchers. Americans searched online for fast-rising topics like the NCAA Championships, the AIG fiasco and the Watchman movie.

Google led the way, posting 9.7 billion queries in March – a 15.4% monthly increase. Look for Google to break the 10 billion query mark in April, all on its own. Two months ago we were declaring the end of Google’s market share growth as it hovered around 70% for most of last year. No more.

Meanwhile Yahoo!’s query volume also grew a substantial 10.2% to 2.3 billion queries. That wasn’t enough to keep up with Google, though – Yahoo! ended up losing 0.6pts share. Google now has 4 times more query volume and market share than Yahoo!. A year ago, Google had a 3x lead over its Sunnyvale cousin.

MSN/Live basically hit the average with 13.9% monthly query growth to 834 million queries. MSN/Live’s rate of sponsored referrals continues to hover at only 3.2% of referrals, compared to 6 – 7% for other top engines.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have come back to the table for a search deal, recognizing Google as a common threat. The combined entity would have 23.1% market share, or 1/3rd of Google’s.

If you want to get your hands on the actual data in this post and a lot more don’t forget to check out Compete’s Data Hub.

• Google query volume charged 15.4% and market share rose to 0.8pts, leading a bullish month in search
• Yahoo! fell to 17.2% market share, a new low, but query volume rose a robust 10.2%
• MSN/Live hovered at 6.3% market share, with solid 13.9% query growth
• Ask maintained 2.4% share and a healthy rate of sponsored referrals at 6.2%
• AOL held on with 0.8% share. Could a possible spinoff from Time-Warner be good news for its search share?

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

Advertising on the web can be a thorny endeavor.  In the run up to Valentine’s Day, flower retailers all spent big on online advertising.  Compete analyzed 1-800-Flowers.com’s Valentine’s Day ad campaigns to measure the sources of greatest impact.

Analysis revealed that AOL was the most effective publisher for 1-800-Flowers: consumers reached on AOL were 83% more likely to visit and 141% more likely to purchase than those reached on other portal homepages.

To download a free copy of Compete’s Valentine’s Day Ad Effectiveness study, visit www.compete.com/adeffectiveness.

With only 28 days, February is typically a low-query month for the leading search engines. This year proved no exception, with query volumes dipping across the board, despite searcher interest in the Oscars and Valentine’s Day.

One interesting result of this dip in query volume was that it actually improved Google’s market share. So while Google’s query volume fell by 1%, its market share actually rose 2.2pts. That move effectively reversed a long term trend we’ve seen with Google’s market share over the past 6 months. Since August 2008, Google’s market share has hovered at 70%. Last month, it hit 72.4%.

While Google benefitted from a down month in its industry, others did not fare so well.

Yahoo! lost 1.5pts market share on 11.6% decline in query volume. It hit a new market share low of 17.8% last month.

MSN/Live also declined 0.4pts and hit a market share low of 6.3% of search queries. Factoring in Club Live, MSN fared somewhat better but still lost share.
Ask also lost both query volume and market share. For the past 6 months, Ask’s share has hovered around 2.5%.

In February, Ask managed to increase Sponsored Referrals, or the rate of referrals that drive advertising revenue, by 46% to 6.2% of all referrals. That brought Ask in line with Google and Yahoo!, which have maintained Sponsored Referrals at 6 – 9% over the past year.

The key points for February, 2009 (excluding Club Live from the market)…

• Google query volume dipped 1% but market share actually rose to 72.4% on a down market, reversing a share slowdown.
• Yahoo! fell to 17.8% market share, a new low. Query volume also declined due to the shortened month.
• MSN/Live also fell to a new low of 6.3% market share, with a similar query decline.
• Ask maintained 2.3% share, but Sponsored Referrals rose to a healthy 6.2%.
• AOL held on with 0.8% share. We’ll see if new CEO Tim Armstrong can bring some of that Google magic.

If you want to get your hands on the actual data in this post and a lot more don’t forget to check out Compete’s Data Hub.

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.