We keep a close eye on search engine usage, especially since Bing came online a few months ago with quite a big media splash.
Before Bing Google was getting roughly 70% of all searches. Now, Google is still the big winner with 65.7% of the searches going through them. And, it’s been rather steady for the last couple of months.
What this means to a marketer is that the first step is to make sure your retailers can run local Google adword campaigns now and worry about the other search engines later. The issue is that it is rather confusing to explain and automate the process for the dealers. To further complicate the explanation and process by dividing the limited spend over several search engines just isn’t worth the effort. The local inventory in Google is large enough that no one has to worry about saturation just yet.
Local Google is a gold mine for local retailers with a far better ROI than almost any other local medium they could use. Let’s get them doing this right before going onto other engines or other online mediums.