According to data from WebVisible, a local advertising service company, small businesses are allocating more of their budgets toward search advertising in the third quarter of 2009.
During the quarter, the average small business in the U.S. spent $1,658 on search advertising and purchased an average of 55 keywords. Both numbers were up from the second quarter, when the average spend was $859 and the average number of keywords was 54.
Average spending in the third quarter of 2009 was up 91 percent from the same quarter in 2008, when spending was $867, and up 93 percent from the previous quarter.
Google, however, isn’t quite benefitting from this trend, as its share of spending declined 5 percentage points from the same quarter last year.
On the other hand, Bing added 2.9 percentage points to its share during the same time period.
Click-through rates increased for all the major search engines, though Yahoo! saw the biggest progress with a 123 percent increase in its CTR. Bing’s CTR rose 76 percent and Google’s increased by 52 percent.
Google was more expensive than its counterparts, as its cost-per-click was, on average, 14 percent higher than the same quarter last year. It was also 30 percent more expensive than Yahoo! and Bing during the third quarter of this year.
On the whole, 32 percent of search clicks examined by WebVisible in the third quarter led to conversion on an advertiser’s Web site.
With regards to actions that occurred when users clicked on a small business search ad, 93.1 percent clicked to a Web site, 49.2 percent submitted an e-mail inquiry, 49.0 percent printed a landing page, 47.2 percent printed driving directions, 32.6 percent bookmarked a page, 16.9 percent viewed a video and 10.2 percent completed a form.
The study found that there wasn’t a major difference in CTR or conversion rates across spending categories of more than $100.
The top advertiser category was attorneys with 7.7 percent of all advertisers, followed by dentists with 5 percent. Attorneys spent an average of $2,560 during the third quarter while dentists spent an average of $2,005.
The top 20 advertiser categories only accounted for 36 percent of all dollars spent in the third quarter, suggesting that small businesses is a very diverse group.
Sources:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007396
http://www.clickz.com/3635747
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