- 3 minutes read time
Ecosia: the search engine with an environmentally conscious target audience
Do you know Ecosia? A German non-profit search engine that uses advertising revenue to plant trees. With every search you do, you make the world a little greener. Fantastic, right? The search engine has also been given a boost by the fact that Google has recently added it as a standard option among the search engines in their own chromium.
Is it bad that you have never heard of Ecosia? Not at all. Although you could already use the search engine via the search bar or via an extension, you had to know that the search engine existed. Now that Google has added it to the list of search engines to choose from in their own chrome browser, people who are not yet familiar with Ecosia can also get to know it.
A search engine that plants trees, nice! But what now?
OK well, apart from the fact that it is good for the environment, what can Ecosia do for you? Ecosia does not store any user data, but using aggregated data from Facebook, they have found that there are mainly young people using the search engine, of whom about ⅓ are between 20 and 35 years old. In addition, slightly more women than men use the search engine and you can assume that everyone who uses Ecosia is green-minded and interested in environmental topics. In addition, about two thirds of the 8 million users live in France or Germany.
To advertise on Ecosia you need a Bing account. Then you can start to set up your ads like in most search engines. The only thing you need to pay attention to, in order to show your ads on Ecosia, is that you choose the last option in the advanced settings ("Bing, AOL and Yahoo! Syndicated Partners Only"). If your ads are running, you can still exclude sites so that they run explicitly and only on Ecosia.
Why would I want my ads on Ecosia?
You may wonder why you should pay for ads on Ecosia when you reach more people on Google. Well, if you look at it from the point of view of a niche product, it can be interesting to show certain ads on this type of search engine. While in some cases with Google Ads it's like shooting a cannon to kill a flea, your target audience is already reasonably well-defined by Ecosia and you can generate more valuable traffic when show your ads to the users of Ecosia.
This is not to suggest that you should completely change your marketing strategy, but Ecosia is a good alternative for Google Ads, Bing Ads or Facebook ads if you weigh up your objectives against your target audience. Unlike other search engines such as DuckDuckGO, Ecosia does have a specific audience.
A sidenote: there are also some doubts. Ecosia's marketing strategy is that when you click on an advertisement, you plant a tree. If there are users who use Ecosia with this intention, this is obviously bad for your ROI. You get a high CTR but a low conversion ratio.
In short
The conclusion of the whole story is that Ecosia gains trust because it is implemented in Chrome. This allows you to make use of the specific characteristics of the people who use Ecosia. We would just like to point out that you should not immediately become enthusiastic about very high click-through rates.
If you think that your product fits in the setting of the Ecosia search engine, but you don't know where to start, we at Esign are very happy to help you. Also for advertising on Google, Bing or any other search network you can rely on the knowledge of our marketers.
Contact us for a coffee and a chat.
