The product I am marketing is a B2B SAAS product, so the click responses are even more intriguing because they aren’t “low-research” items like a TV or stereos - which house person “mom” might click, read and make a decision to buy or go leave and search some more.

Even my boss is pleasantly surprised as the initial performance figures from Yahoo and MSN… and he’s the ex-CMO of Web Trends.

A presentation I saw recently showed that Yahoo and MSN have a much higher conversion rate for a sample of large brands (a lot of commerce & electronics).

My explanation is that MAYBE Google users are more likely to do extensive research, whereas the MSN user (like my mom) just finds something that looks good, pulls the trigger, then goes back into the kitchen to bake the neighbor’s kids cookies.

Google’s initial bid price for keyword searches is a little crazy… although it’s a supply and demand thing… For a good number of our keyboard buys, they are averaging $10/keyword. MSN and Yahoo ask for bids of $.10 to $.50 for the SAME keywords.

But here’s the kicker… we get 2x to 3x MORE click traffic from Yahoo and MSN than we do from Google… and the lead/click quality is about the same.

Yes, Google gets more search traffic than MSN or Yahoo… but based on price and click throughs MSN and Yahoo are delivering better initial results.

I can’t say we’ll not use Google’s ad program as they still reign supreme for search, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that as an advertiser, other sites can deliver keyword buys that perform better.