WebSideStory released a study showing the conversion rate stats across their many clients for the leading search engines. Surprisingly, the results placed Google at the bottom of the pack, with conversion rates lower than AOL, MSN and Yahoo!
Search Engine Conversion Rates
| AOL traffic | 6.17% |
| MSN traffic | 6.03% |
| Yahoo traffic | 4.07% |
| Google traffic | 3.83% |
Studying Our Conversion Rate Results
At AccuraCast, we conducted a smaller-scale study across some of our UK small and medium enterprise customers and found the results were not very different:
| Ask traffic | 4.17% |
| MSN traffic | 3.79% |
| Yahoo! traffic | 3.39% |
| Google traffic | 3.33% |
| AOL traffic | 2.81% |
| AltaVista traffic | 2.63% |
One possible explanation of Google’s lower conversion rate could be that Google offers much higher volumes of searchers and more results – the combined effect of which statistically leads to lower conversion rates. Another possibility is that searchers often use Google as an information resource and are not always looking to make a purchase – which would lead to more visitors who do not intend to buy.
