This comes up a lot, and it doesn’t matter the industry. Some clients panic when they can’t see themselves in a Yahoo search. Others wonder if they need to be doing Bing Ads.

Fundamental to these questions is market share of browsers, and online search engine use. Let’s take a look at the stats from gs.statcounter.com:
search engine stats

There is a rule among workplace efficiency gurus, or at least a kind of principle. It’s called the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle. It says that 20% of customers produce about 80% of sales, and that 20% of your time produces 80% of your results. In investing, they say that 80% of results come from 20% of the causes. That’s the general idea, that most of the effect you see comes from just a small portion of what you do.

The rule works for web marketing and search marketing. You can spend time working to get seen on every browser, but your work on Google will produce at least 80% of the results. Fortunately for us search marketers, we don’t really have to guess where is the valuable area to spend our time, the area that will produce that 80%. It’s Google.

That said, let’s look at North America, versus worldwide:

You can see the bing and Yahoo! numbers go up. But still, you’ve got to decide if it’s worth setting up ads, monitoring, and tweaking on these other platforms.

If you’re on the fence, look at these numbers for search engines on mobile devices:

Google very much dominates on mobile devices. And if you take a close look at your Google Analytics, you’ll find that a hefty percentage of your traffic is on mobile devices (average is about 52 percent in North America).

Speaking of Google Analytics, that is probably the best way to decide if you should advertise on the smaller search engines. You can see which browser people use to get to your site. This doesn’t necessarily show search engines, however. But people on Chrome are almost surely using Google, and the default search engine for Safari is Google, and Chrome and Safari dominate the browsers.

Why To Use Bing and Yahoo!

The latest statistics show that Bing Ads is growing pretty dramatically. In fact, the latest numbers say that Bing Ads have 19.7% of the US market share. Yahoo! is growing too. All this is driven by the fact that more and more money from advertising budgets is being poured into search advertising. In fact, a recent study found that search advertising will account for 20% of ad spend this year.

Twenty percent should make most companies take a close look at Bing Ads. Furthermore, consider these points about Bing Ads:

  • It’s cheaper.
  • More detailed targeting.
  • More extensions options.