Google dominates UK search advertising

Google continues to dominate UK search advertising, capturing 85% of search engine spending in the first quarter of 2008 and increasing its ROI by 14% since last quarter of 2007.

This was shared by search engine marketing company Efficient Frontier in its UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q1 2008.

According to the company, for the same period, MSN made modest gains in share of search spending as it offers the highest ROI of the three search engines, in spite of the last quarter's 16% increase in Cost Per Click.

The report shows a difficult quarter for Yahoo! with sharply declining Click Through Rates (-38%) and a subsequent decline in ROI of 6% in Q1 2008 versus Q4 2007. However, much of this decline might be attributable to Yahoo's expansion of its partner syndication network into high volume, lower quality sources of search traffic, it added.

David White, general manager, Efficient Frontier Europe said, "We are seeing an increasingly strong front runner in Google in the UK and broader European markets."

The report was completed by Efficient Frontier based upon analysed data from a fixed sample of UK search engine advertisers across multiple verticals, including; retail, finance, travel and telecommunications. The company considered factors such as: search engine spend, click-through-rates (CTRs), cost per click (CPC) and return on investment (ROI).