Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) - but not large ones - rate Google's keyword search offering as superior to Yahoo's, according to the second annual Outsell, Inc. study, reports MarketingCharts.

The study looks at companies' ad budgets and strategies, broken out by business size:

• Some 58 percent of small companies rate Google ads effective, compared with only 32 percent that rate Yahoo effective.
• Three-quarters of midsize businesses rated Google search ads effective; slightly less than half rated Yahoo effective.
• Among large companies, 63 percent rate Google effective and a nearly identical 62 percent rate Yahoo keyword search effective.

Among additional Outsell research findings:

• Small companies devote almost twice as much of their budgets to print as midsize companies.
• Midsize businesses rate the effectiveness of print trade magazines and events much higher than smaller companies do.
• Small companies' share of online ad spending on search engines is more than double the share of medium or large companies'.
• Click fraud continues to deter some companies from pay-per-click advertising:
  • Large companies estimate that nearly one-fifth of clicks on their ads are fraudulent
  • Small companies estimate that 14.4 percent of clicks on their ads are fraudulent.

Additional findings from the Outsell report are available at MarketingCharts.