Useful Search Marketing Statistics

The Basics

• The share of searches performed in the US as of July 2006: Google 49.2%, Yahoo 23.8%, MSN 9.6%, AOL 6.3% and Ask 2.6%.
  Source: Searchenginewatch.com/Nielsen Netratings 

Response Rate by Position

• The top three organic listings are viewed 100% of the time, with lower positioned listings getting incrementally less attention as follows: rank 4 (85%), rank 5 (60%) rank 6 & 7 (50%), rank 8 and 9 (30%), rank 10 (10%).
  Source: Eyetools, Enquiro & Did-it.com Eyetracking Study.
• The top paid search listing is viewed 50% of the time, with lower positioned listings getting incrementally less attention as follows: rank 2 (40%), rank 3 (30%), rank 4 (20%), rank 5-8 (10%)
  Source: Eyetools, Enquiro & Did-it.com Eyetracking Study.

Conversion Rates for Paid v.s Organic Search Listings

• Conversion rates for paid vs. organic listings are nearly identical, with B-to-C conversion rates for paid search at about 3.40% vers 3.13% for organic search results.

The Retail Channel

• 25% of conversions occurring from users who click on more than one ad
• Branded search offer the highest conversion rate (9.3%) occurring when a user’s first and last click resulted on searching for a branded term. 
• When the first click was the result of a nonbranded search and the last click on a branded search, the conversion rate was slightly lower at 8.73%.
• For searchers who began their search using a nonbranded term, but ended with a branded query, conversion rates were seven times higher than when they used only nonbranded terms.
• Only 8.4% of searchers used multiple unique keywords, but they accounted for nearly 20% of transactions.
  Source: 360i and SearchIgnite

Market Growth for Paid Search

• The average number of active keywords in Q1 2006 was up 36% compared with Q1 2005
• The total number of clicks to paid search ads rose 24%
• Sales from paid search ads increased by 72%, as measured in dollars
  During the December 2005 holiday season, nearly 30% of clicks came from keywords costing .50 per click or more, but that proportion dropped to 20% in March 2006
  Source: Doubleclick Performics 50 Search Trend Report Q1 2006
• Search spend increased by 44% from 2004 to 2005, with advertisers spending 5.75 billion in search in 2005 and 64% from 2005 to 2006 (or 9.45 billion) (Source: SEMPO)
• In 2006, SEM programs were primarily funded by shifting budgets from offline media including print magazines (20%), Direct mail (16%), TV advertising (13%), newspaper advertising (13%) (Source: SEMPO)

Add comment March 10th, 2007

What is Google’s Content Network?

I get this question a lot and so I decided to blog it. After all, my clients can’t be the only ones who are wondering.

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The content network is part of Google’s network of sites that display Google ads unrelated to keywords. The ads show up beside content that is contextually relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on. You can enable content-targeting at the campaign level (as opposed to the Ad Group level) and you still pay per click. There are often many more impressions (times your ads show up) when you implement content-targeting, but the clickthrough rates are usually much lower because it’s a more passive type of advertising than keyword search.  Here is a link to Google’s help page which summarizes the content network and gives examples of some of the sites that are displaying Google ads:

https://adwords.google.com/select/afc.html

And here is an example of a Web page that is displaying Google ads (note the ads at the left of the page beneath the link that says “Ads by Google”):

http://www.wikipregnancy.com

Yahoo and MSN both offer versions of content-targeting, but Google’s network seems to be the most comprehensive. It’s important to test the performance of content-targeted ads because some categories can literally rack up millions of impressions in mere weeks, which translate into thousands or tens of thousands of clicks and can become very expensive. These ads generally don’t convert as well as keyword ads, so if you’re managing a campaign to a specific ROI goal or CPA, content-targeting may blow your performance out of the water (in a bad way).

Add comment March 1st, 2007