SEM News: All Clicks Aren’t Created Equal: Q&A With Danny Sullivan

Earlier this month, in a blog post reporting our clients' aggregate ad spend across the major search engines, we noted that Google's slice of the pay-per-click pie increased across 2007. I wrote

"We never sat down and had meetings about moving budgets. Rather, our systems noticed that ever-so-slightly better clicks could be had on Google and so shifted spend there. "Better" in this context means "more likely to generate sales dollars or margin dollars for our clients".

This shift from Yahoo to Google was imperceptible on the day-to-day scale. The search wars are fought one click at a time. One bid at a time. A penny here and a penny there. But looking back over '07, the trend becomes clear: across our client base, Google won 5 points of share at Yahoo’s expense.

Danny Sullivan, illustrious Editor-In-Chief, emailed me some follow-up questions about how we buy clicks for clients (answer: carefully!), and how we allocate budget across the engines (answer: we don't!).

At Danny's suggestion, I'll respond to his questions about that post more fully here. Danny's words are presented in bold. I'll also show an Excel analysis you can run on your own PPC data to explore your own efficiency vs. volume trade-off curve.

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