Image Isn’t Everything. Yahoo Favicons Drive No Change in Search Behavior

Yahoo is doing a beta on Favicons.  What is a Favicon?  A Favicon is  a corporate or product logo that is placed next to a branded paid search advertisement (see diagram below).  Google is talking about allowing the same concept.  The hope of marketers is that Favicons will improve brand awareness online and allow search to be used more effectively as a branding media.

Image Isn't Everything

The question then becomes, “does a logo in search actually drive improved performance?”

For the customers with whom we are doing this test, we looked at the performance on CTRs, CPCs, and conversion rates three weeks prior to the launch of the Favicons and 3 weeks after.  The table below shows the indexed results:

The conclusion?  In this test, Favicons had zero impact on performance.  Now, before condemning this concept to the marketing garbage heap, let’s make a couple Actionable insights.

The space Yahoo is offering for the logo’s is tiny.  It is very hard to even detect (and most corporate logo’s don’t play well in 10 font on a search engine return page screen).   So it may be less a factor of the concept, and still just a mechanical issue about the size of the logo display.

The logo space also requires organizations to only show the “pictorial” aspect of the logo.  Many organizations, for example Verizon, have a combined logo and corporate name  – .  Separating out the “check mark” aspect of the log from the name would cause the branding people at the organization to have severe short term health problems.

Actionable Insight #1:  Our advice – unless the logo of the organization is completely self contained and pictorial (like Target – ) don’t even bother with this branding concept.  And, of course, test this.  The results of our tests show that there was ZERO different in performance for our customers – so adding the logo will not drive improved performance, at least not in the short term.

Image isn’t everything!

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