AOL search engine has the highest conversion rate.

I read recently that e-commerce sites get the best conversion rates from visitors using AOL's search engine. In other words, a visitor who arrives via the AOL search engine is significantly more likely to purchase something or "convert" than a visitor from, say, from Google. The study looked at companies that sell $3 billion worth of goods online anually. The percentage conversion rates during January 2006 on were shown as:

Search Engine

Conversion Rate (All Categories)

AOL

6.2%

MSN

6.0%

Yahoo!

4.1%

Google

3.83%

Unfortunately, the study did not differentiate between pay per click conversions and conversions arising from organic searches. We checked our SEO clients' sites and saw a similar pattern, even though our clients aren't yet selling $3 billion worth of goods online! AOL referals do indeed convert better than Google, but the number of AOL referals was a only a fraction of the number coming from Google, which is easily the #1 search engine in terms of number of users. In contrast to the Webside Story study though, our MSN conversion rates for our financial sites were much lower, and less than 0.5% even. The different conversion rates we see in MSN for our financial sites suggests that conversion rates also vary by market, as well as search engine. In any case, should we optimise our sites better for AOL? Well, AOL are using Google's index, so if you're ranked #1 in Google, you're #1 in AOL too. The difference in conversion rate is due to demographic factors - AOL searchers like to buy, Google searchers like to browse. The problem is that there are too few AOL users. Although the AOL percentage conversion rates were higher, there was a much larger number of conversions coming from Google traffic. However, if you were bidding for search engine traffic in a market that converted better in Yahoo than in Google, for example, then the situation could be different. Clearly, anyone doing internet marketing should know their demographic base and track their visitors. This will allow them to manage their search engine optimisation efforts, and especially their pay per click campaigns, effectively.