USA vs. Canada Part 1: Google Adwords
Aug 15, 2007 Google Adwords
As promised last week in my post on Quantitative Search Share Analysis, over the next few days we’ll be examining traffic share across individual search engines based with respect to Canadian and US targeting. Today we’re starting things out with a bang, and we’ll dive right into the search leader - Google Adwords. According to our figures, Google dominates the paid search scene with over 90% search share. But how is traffic share divided along the Canadian-American border? As we learn, the stats are not exactly what you might expect.
In my last post, I concocted three unique categories that more or less clarifies the types of paid search campaigns most advertisers focus on - branding, product sales, and professional services. Last time the unique categories of products and services contained data that warranted greater granularity. This time, however, there is no such correlation and for all intents and purposes, products and services data will be combined.
To the results…
Branding Campaigns
As you might expect, traffic figures across branding campaigns are generally only a fraction of search queries relative to products and services. However, the value in branding campaigns is through the exclusive use of company trademarks, extremely high quality score, ridiculously low CPCs, and generally less competition.
Contrary to what you might expect, Canadian branding campaigns do much better on Google Adwords than identical American campaigns. In our analysis, 88% of total Google search traffic on branding campaigns originated in Canada. Quelle surprise!
Keep in mind that these results are based on average impressions over the course of three months. One might argue that Americans are less likely to search for brand names due to less customer loyalty, or perhaps in part because of “marketing overload”.
In any event, the take home message here is to Canadian businesses and American companies marketing to Canadians: “Branding Campaigns are Good.”
Products and Services
Thankfully there are not many surprises in the e-commerce campaigns. Many of us already know that the American search market in Google Adwords is much more lucrative than the Canadian search market. If you needed any more proof, here it is:
As you can see, traffic through Adwords campaigns for products and services favors US traffic 3:1. Honestly, I would have expected a much larger gap on the order of 4:1, but we should see significant change next quarter with back to school traffic after the dog days of summer.
Overall Traffic Share: Google Adwords
Analysis wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the overall picture for total search share. Results are surprising for Canadian-targeting advertisers:
Amazingly, Google Adwords search share is split almost perfectly 3:2 in favor of the United States over Canada. These numbers are surprising, given Google’s dominance in the online search market. It would certainly be interesting to see what happens in Q3, as e-commerce begins to pick up in the fall.
Unfortunately we’ll have to wait until Q4 to see if these numbers hold up. In the meantime, I’ll be analyzing identical campaign statistics from Yahoo Search Marketing to determine the best bet for your geo-targeted branding, products and service campaigns.
Until then, Hit me up for Digg.com !
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