H&R BLOCK VS. TURBOTAX: WHO WON THE PPC RANKING BATTLE BEFORE TAX DAY?

The Search Monitor writes: Welcome to the Tax Day edition of the Search Monitor blog! We hope this is a day of celebration (refund)!

We decided to look at the two big players in tax filing and see how they have been preparing for the big day. We dove into our Lighthouse monitoring product–which focuses on competitive intelligence for 22 different verticals–and performed this analysis:

• Looked at 8 popular keyword phrases about tax filing services
• Looked at the run-up period before Tax Day, specifically March 8 to April 7, 2014
• Looked at ads run on Google in the United States
• Looked at two of the big players: H&R Block and TurboTax
• Pulled the Rank Knockout chart, which shows the competitors that are knocking your site out of the ranking of your choice for a given set of keywords and time period

Our Hypothesis: H&R Block and TurboTax would be bidding appropriately to ensure very high visibility on these essential keywords. We thought one of the two would be ranked #1 for every one of our keywords. Also, when we polled our team of analysts,  a few respondents thought that TurboTax would out-rank H&R Block for terms around e-filing (i.e. digital terms), while H&R Block would rank higher on more general, offline terms.

OK, drum roll please!  Here’s what we found:

Our color commentary:

• H&R Block dominated the #1 rank for 3 important keywords. This included ‘efile’, which was contrary to our hypothesis that TurboTax would be owning this one. The other two keywords where H&R Block performed well (tax services and tax preparation) were more general terms, like we suspected. Kudos to H&R Block for owning those key phrases – they either had higher bids or had an amazing Ad Quality score. Ot a little of both.
• For the keyword ‘file taxes’, the two industry leaders were about neck-and-neck. Notice how those two numbers sum to 100%, meaning that no other company made it to the top rank during this 30-day period.
• TurboTax did not perform well for ‘tax software’, showing up as #1 only 20% of the time. This surprised us. Most of us thought that H&R Block was more well known for their in-office tax filing services and not their software.
• We noticed how slight differences in keywords produced different results for ranking. Changing ‘file taxes’ to ‘filing taxes’ resulted in better ranking for TurboTax. The same scenario occurred when the word ‘online’ was added to ‘file taxes’. We’d love to hear your comments on this
• Lastly, we love the Rank Knockout Chart. It’s a Search Monitor exclusive that shows anyone how they stack up against their competitors . If you’d like us to pull the report for a keyword set, just reach out or request a demo.

So, we actually won this battle? It’s tricky to say with just this data. We’d want to see metrics such as: which keywords had the most volume, which companies received more clicks, what the total spend was for each, and then ask each company what their total revenue and ROI was for this time period.

Our competitive ad monitoring tools can help with every data point on that list (except the last two).  :)