Google’s Market Share grows while MSN struggles to hold on

By Joanne Casey

Account Executive, Interactive Return

Hitwise figures recently showed Google’s market share growing stronger by 7%- accounting for 63.98% of US searches with Yahoo receiving just a little more than a third of that with 22.87% while MSN and Ask trailed along behind with 7.98% and 3.48% respectively.

Google’s market share continues to fluctuate between the 60-65% band while Yahoo has seen continuous growth since its blip in April to reach a similar percentage share to what it stood at this time last year. Ask’s market share though, this past year never ventured past the 5% mark while MSN share has seen an overall fall from the high of a reported 13.2% in June (when the Live Search Promotion caused a surge in percentage market share), to the lowest point so far since August 2006 at 7.98%. In addition, Hitwise announced that it has already begun to filter out automatically-generated searches that have been done to try and win games so does the future for MSN looks bleak?

MSN has continuously attempted to improve the services they offer in both their ad centre interface and their search facility.
Microsoft Live has a clean-cut and coherent search box with the added offering of the very handy scratchpad, while its own crawler and ranking system allows differentiation from other search engines as search results are no longer pulled from a third party.

Live search now supports sitemaps via auto discovery (but will only use your sitemaps if they are listed in robots.txt file) and along with the emergence of Ad centre Labs MSN has recently updated their Ad centre interface. Although it is not as user friendly as Google or Yahoo, they do appear to be on their way towards a more streamline and faster service.

Some improvements include:

· Faster Editorial process
· Faster Campaign Updates
· Direct import of campaigns from other search advertisers
· Can now copy existing ad group settings for faster implementation of new campaigns
· Can now edit multiple keyword bids at one time

While Microsoft have just launched their content network to their customers, the underlying problem many search marketers that run PPC campaigns on MSN have, is the lack of available volume that continues to be evidently low.

With MSN now reported to be in talks to buy a 5% Facebook stake to expand its ad deal abroad, it will be interesting to see if MSN can climb back towards the level of market share they were once at.