• PromotionWorld, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:15 PM

Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. "Google, regardless of it's [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals," he says. "It's important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process."

For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you're positioning a product for the younger set, "there's still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo," Henige says.

Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online--and tended to attract searchers from the "affluent suburbia" and "upscale America" brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, "gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start," Henige says.

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