Vertical search engines (VSEs) such as Kellysearch are becoming increasingly popular in the online Business-to-Business (B2B) community, and as VSEs continue to diversify they will likely become more attractive to users and advertisers alike. If you are not already, now is the time to integrate VSE advertising into your comprehensive online marketing and promotional campaigns.

What are vertical search engines?

As opposed to general search engines like Google and Yahoo!, which crawl the entire web for results, VSEs crawl only within specific industries and businesses. Though general search engines often return the most information in terms of sheer numbers, vertical search engines will return the most relevant information.

Try typing “combine” into a general search engine. You’ll return results about software programs, simulation games, and merging words together—which is fine, unless you’re a farmer looking to purchase a £200,000 piece of agricultural equipment. Each industry has its own buzzwords, jargon, and acronyms. VSEs are more likely to know just what users are talking about, and point them in the right direction—ideally, to your company, service, or product.

Why advertise with vertical search engines?

The specificity and industry know-how that characterise VSEs also create a fruitful opportunity for advertisers. Users searching VSEs are typically closer to making a purchase or a purchasing enquiry. In other words, if users have got as far as a vertical search, they’ve essentially classified themselves as interested buyers. Now it’s a matter of how to reach them. Once a target demographic for a product or service is identified, chances are there’s a VSE that caters to these ideal prospects. But can they truly work against the online ubiquity of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (GYM)?

At Kellysearch we decided to investigate the following assumption; that VSE advertising yields a better Return On Investment (ROI) than advertising on Google, by taking an independent company’s website and placing advertising on both Google and Kellysearch to the same value and over the same time period and monitoring the response. The results make for interesting reading.

Over a three month campaign the advertising on Google generated over 150,000 advert impressions, in contrast the advert on Kellysearch produced less than 2,000 – as expected. However by tracking every incoming enquiry and working closely with the company themselves, we were able to truly understand the quality of the traffic generated and not just the quantity. Google produced a higher number of clicks, phone calls and emails; but ultimately fewer orders than the Kellysearch advertising.

The story does not end there though; looking at the value of those orders demonstrates the intent and B2B responsibility of the Kellysearch (VSE) user – these people are not consumer browsers. 10 orders were closed from prospects on Kellysearch to the value of £4,300; the Google orders totaled £550 – a negative ROI.

There’s more. Though the initial Cost Per Click and Click Through Rate costs were higher, the Costs Per Order were lower and the Average Order Value higher for the sales made as a response to the advertising on Kellysearch. The company even described the leads from Google as “a distraction for my sales people”!