When evaluating the best search engines to spend your marketing budget and effort on, usually the blanket rule of biggest is best, is applied. While being highly visible to a large audience is a great initial search engine marketing goal, when ROI becomes your campaigns driving force, the real objective is being seen by potential customers in a search engine that generates results. And this is when all search engines are not the same especially when evaluating Google vs. Yahoo! vs. MSN.

BIGresearch have just released their latest Simultaneous Media Study (SMM) which after consulting with 15000 respondents provides a great insight into which search engines are best for influencing purchase decisions on particular product categories. In lay terms - which search engine people use to buy specific products.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

For all of you, like me, who thought that Google was sure to be at the top of most of the product categories - you’ll be surprised!

The top 5 places overall for “influence on purchase decision” rank as follows: