October 30, 2009

Anchor Intelligence Reports Decline in Click Fraud, Identifies New Hotspots

Anchor Intelligence has released its click fraud report for the third quarter of 2009. It paints a different picture than the Click Forensics report that was recently released. Where Click Forensics saw an increase, Anchor Intelligence saw a decline.

Overall, click fraud was 23.2% in Q3, down 14.3% from 27.1% in the second quarter. Anchor Intelligence breaks its click fraud rates into two categories: attempted click fraud, the kind with evil intentions, and innocuous click fraud, like an accidental click. Attempted click fraud was 18.6% in Q3 down from 22.9% in Q2. Innocuous rates increased from 4.2% in Q2 to 4.6% in Q3.

Anchor Intelligence's data reports attempted click fraud, not billed click fraud. Their ClearMark for Traffic system integrates with ad networks and search engines and identifies fraudulent clicks before the advertiser is affected.

Egypt and Indonesia have emerged as leaders in click fraud rates - percentage-wise. Volume is still highest in the United States:

Anchor Intelligence says it did observe more sophisticated click fraud schemes in the third quarter, such as browser hijacking. They also saw an increase in the threats of malicious advertisements in paid search and ads on publisher websites.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2009

Tweet This: 19 Percent of Internet Users Use Twitter

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 19 percent of Internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys conducted in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11 percent of internet users said they used Twitter or another micro-blogging service.

Three groups of Internet users are responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social networking site users, mobile Internet users, and adults under age 44.

In addition, the more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter or another service to update their status. Fully 39 percent of Internet users with four or more internet-connected devices (such as a laptop, cell phone, game console, or Kindle) use Twitter, compared to 28 percent of Internet users with three devices, 19 percent of Internet users with two devices, and 10 percent of Internet users with one device.

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. By comparison, the median age for a LinkedIn user is now 39, down from 40, while the median age for a Facebook user is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

According to Pew, it will become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa. For now, it is clear that a "social segment" of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online.

Cindy Krum, CEO of Rank-Mobile, interviewed Mark Jackson, CEO of Vizion Interactive, about the Twitter panel discussion at SES Toronto 2009.

Twitter is no Google - Mark Jackson, Vizion Interactive at SES Toronto 2009

At SES Chicago 2009, Jackson will be speaking at the "SEO Through Blogs & Feeds" session, and Krum will be speaking at the "Cool Mobile Apps, Augmented Reality - It's a Brave New World!" session.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

October 26, 2009

Botnets Drive Up Click Fraud Rate in Third Quarter 2009

Click Forensics has released its click fraud report for the third quarter of 2009. Botnet activity caused the rate to rise and accounted for more click fraud activity.

The click fraud rate rose to 14.1% in the third quarter, up from 12.7% in the second quarter, but down from 16% in the third quarter of 2008.

Botnets accounted for 42.6% of click fraud in Q3 2009, more than double the 27.5% rate in Q3 2008.

"The significant rise in botnet-generated click fraud lines up with recent findings of several well-known malware and online fraud tracking experts," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. "Botnets perpetrating click fraud and other online schemes continue to grow in number and sophistication. Advertisers and ad providers need to be especially vigilant about such activity as we enter the competitive search marketing holiday season."

Outside of North America, the countries producing the most click fraud were United Kingdom, Vietnam and Germany.

One of the most significant findings in the third quarter was the discovery of the "Bahama botnet," which was redirecting traffic through 200,000 parked domains located in the Bahamas. Click Forensics detected a link between the Bahama botnet and the New York Times ad scareware incident.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 23, 2009

46% of Local Searchers Visit Businesses In-Store

46% of local searchers make in-store visits, according to data released to eMarketer by TMP Directional Marketing and comScore. The number is up 12% over last year.

Meanwhile, for "general searches," 34% visited stores, but this was only up 1% over last year. Internet yellow pages searchers also came in at 34%, up from 29% last year. The overall average of searchers ending up in-store was 37%.

What local searchers are looking for are businesses that provide the products and services they're looking for. After they've found that, they look for address and location information and then a phone number.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 19, 2009

PriceGrabber's Holiday Consumer Spending Forecast: How Full or Empty is Your Glass?

PriceGrabber has released their holiday consumer spending forecast and it's clear that shoppers are hankering down on the ol' family budget. It's not quite as severe as last year, but consumers seem to be planning their holiday spending with more diligence this time around. In order to spend smarter, they're starting earlier, doing their research and looking for deals. Let's dig in.

70% of consumers are conducting product research and comparison shopping online. This has nearly doubled from last year, which was 38%. That behavior is already in progress. 30% have already begun shopping, most of them beginning this month (October).

Fewer consumers are planning to spend less. This year 53% plan to spend less than they did last year. That's down from 71% of consumers who were asked the same question in 2008. It's good news that the number has dropped, but retailers need that number to drop even more.

The top 3 ways consumers plan to save are:

research and comparison shop online (70%)
shop at discount stores (50%)
use online coupons (39%).

If you have a clearance, discount or outlet part of your e-commerce site, you'll want to promote it. 50% of consumers are planning to shop at discount or outlet stores this year, while only 43% did so last year.

Women will make more of an effort to save than men. Female consumers dominate every penny-pinching category except for research and comparison shopping. 72% of men and 67% of women will research and compare online this year.

When it comes to how much will be spent, about 53% will spend less. 70% of those surveyed plan to spend less than $1,000.

The top 3 reasons for spending less this year should come as no surprise:

increase in prices of necessities (48%)
lack of confidence in the economy (45%)
making less money this year (38%)

43% of consumers expect to shop on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Of those, 79% plan to spend on Black Friday and 66% plan to make a purchase on Cyber Monday.

29% of consumers are planning to purchase gifts for fewer people. That's more than double last year's number, when only 10% crossed names off their gift-giving lists. Acquaintances, coworkers and service providers are most likely to get the axe at 57%, 53% and 44% respectively.

We just threw a ton of numbers at you, but if you're hungry for more, there's a ton more data where this came from. Check out PriceGrabber's full 16 page report (PDF) here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 15, 2009

Bing's Growth Slows, Google Recoups Losses in comScore September 2009 Report

comScore has released their search engine share report for September 2009 and we're seeing yet another twist in the "Can Bing catch up with Google?" saga. You may remember that Bing has been on quite a roll since launch gaining over 1 percentage point, with Google and Yahoo! trading off the losses.

Well, the tides began to turn last month, with Google regaining 0.3% of its loss and Bing gaining another 0.1% in share, which is not the rate of growth they have been experiencing. This time, Yahoo! suffered the losses with a 0.5% decline. Ask.com and AOL held steady.

Another interesting tidbit is YouTube's continued growth and how it compares to search. Greg Jarboe already provided you with the scoop on how more YouTube videos were watched in August than searches conducted in September. Be sure to read his post because this is a phenomenon to watch for sure.

Also, read up on Promoted Videos, which is essentially paid search for YouTube. You can now purchase Promoted Videos in AdWords, which will appear in the search results over at YouTube.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

October 14, 2009

Give Them a Chapter Online, They're More Likely to Buy the Whole Book

At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, new data presented by LibreDigital shows that readers who get access to a sample chapter of a book online are more likely to buy the whole thing. LibreDigital has powered 500 million page views of sample chapters for retailers, authors and social networking sites.

"In the case of one well-known book publisher, one in three people who browsed decided to purchase the book online," said Russell P. Reeder, President and CEO of LibreDigital, Inc. "As a result, leading publishers are increasing their use of online previews when planning promotional campaigns for both new and existing book titles."

Other need-to-know data about selling books includes:

Women are spending nearly 70 percent more time browsing books online than men do.
The most popular genre of books browsed online is romance novels, followed by books for tweens/teens and business books. The peak time for browsing romance titles is 11pm - 1am, in contrast to 4pm - 11pm for tween/teen books and 9am - 5pm for business books.
An average reader spends more than 15 minutes browsing a book. They also preview an average of 46 pages of each book they browse.
Adults are more likely to share links to content via email, while younger readers prefer to share within social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 13, 2009

Not So Fast: Efficient Frontier's Search Ad Data Paints a Different Picture than SearchIgnite's

Yesterday, we reported on Search Ignite's Q3 2009 search ad spend data. The report offered much optimism for the future since they saw a 10% increase over the second quarter of 2009, with the year-over-year data staying pretty flat.

However, Efficient Frontier has released their data, and while there is still optimism, it's not quite as pronounced. Their Q3 2009 data was down 5% year-over-year with just a 5% bump over Q2.

The biggest difference in their data came in search engine market share. Specifically, Microsoft saw a gain thanks to Bing, with their spend share increasing from 4.3% in Q2 to 5.3% in Q3. Their click share also rose from 4.1% to 4.8% quarter-to-quarter.

Who lost share? Google. However, Google has been actively trying to make their search ad service more efficient, which may account for decreased dollars and clicks. In essence, they've been bloated. Their new diet looks to be working, since conversions are up a whopping 47% year-over-year.

Efficient Frontier's data for Yahoo! mimicked Search Ignite's with a slight increase quarterly, after a big drop annually.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 12, 2009

Will Black Friday Become Cyber Friday?

One of the most significant online shopping days of the year is Cyber Monday, which, like Black Friday, follows Thanksgiving and unofficially marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. But new data that Yahoo! has released suggests that Black Friday is itself increasingly becoming a popular day for online shoppers.

Last year, while overall click-through rates were down for both days, conversions shot up 147% for Black Friday while they "only" increased 73% on Cyber Monday.

Let's face it, search marketers. You gotta play both days.

Anecdotally, I can testify to being online with my computer at midnight on Thanksgiving/Black Friday, soaking up a sweet deal on some scooters for my kids. I did it all from the comfort of my rental condo atop of a peak in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, which I can assure you is far preferable to the (unfortunately lethal) stomping grounds of big box stores across the land.

While the economy has consumers as uncertain as ever, I wouldn't be surprised if last year's Walmart deaths have people bumping those conversion rates even more this year. Make sure you've got great deals and free shipping. You might just save a life.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

October 6, 2009

IAB Report: Internet Advertising Down, Search Ads Up First Half 2009

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers have released their semiannual report on the state of Internet advertising. Overall Internet advertising in the first half of 2009 declined by 5.3% compared to the same period, coming in at $10.9 billion. However, search continues to ride out the economic downturn by increasing 1.7% to $5.15 billion.

"While the overall advertising market has continued to be impacted by current economic conditions, marketers are allocating more of their dollars to digital media for its accountability and because consumers are spending more of their leisure time online," said David Silverman, PwC Assurance partner.

The news is good for an industry that has weathered the current economic woes better than most - especially its traditional advertising predecessor.

"We are in one of the most difficult economic slumps in decades. Interactive is one of the advertising sectors that has been least affected," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. "In recent years the digital revolution has driven a transformation of how consumers experience advertising and media. As the economy improves, we're confident that brands will devote an even greater share of their budgets to reaching consumers as they make interactive media a larger part of their lives."

Looksmart CEO Ted West agrees. I spoke with him following the release of the data to get his reaction to the findings.

"This is the first recessionary cycle the industry has experienced. We don't have the benefit of looking back of a tipping point and how things might bounce back," said West. "The stability of search points to the strength of adoption. When the recovery does occur, search will be a very strong beneficiary of that trend."

Because of that stability, online marketers can have confidence in maintaining their search marketing campaigns.

"I think that most search advertisers and their various agencies have developed a really sound base of experience and alternatives. I would continue to pursue those methods in selection and monitoring of keywords," advised West. "It's not a time to dramtically change. Search has proven to be productive."

West emphasized that consumers haven't left the internet, but when the conversions pick up again, search will benefit from that uptick.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 23, 2009

Bing Continues to Boom, At Google's Expense

The August 2009 search rankings by comScore are out and the news continues to be good for Bing. Microsoft sites grabbed an additional 0.4% share. Meanwhile, Google lost 0.1% share as did AOL, which is powered by Google search. Yahoo! and Ask.com remained steady.

This brings Bing's market share gains since launch to 1.3% and Google's loss since Bing's launch to 0.4%. (See July and June data for reference.)

Meanwhile, Bing experienced the biggest growth among the top 5 in search queries, at 7%, outpacing the percentage growth of overall searches as well.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Facebook and Nielsen Team Up for New Advertising Initiative

Facebook is entering into a partnership with Nielsen for a new advertising offering on the social network. Dubbed BrandLift, the initiative will use Nielsen's market research expertise to reach the more than 300 million members on Facebook.

"Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effectiveness data," said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

Rolling out as a test to a few advertisers this week, BrandLift uses opt-in polls on Facebook's homepage to measure consumer attitude and intent about brands. BrandLift will roll out to all advertisers in the coming months.

"Facebook is an increasingly vital link between consumers and brands," said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen's online division. "We will now be able to add deep knowledge of this important social network to our unmatched media measurement and consumer insight across all three screens. Together we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how Web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior."

Through the partnership, Facebook and Nielsen hope to provide advertisers with more accurate market data in a more timely fashion. Additionally, the polls are easy to create and should reduce the upfront time needed to conduct campaigns.

Members have not been forgotten in the process. Polls will be spaced out so as not to bombard any individual user. Additionally, no personally identifiable information will be collected from the polls.

Let's have a little informal poll right now. What's your reaction to the Facebook-Nielsen partnership? Will you use BrandLift in your social marketing campaigns? Leave your survey answers below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 17, 2009

Clearsaleing Offers Attribution Index to Help Allocate Marketing Budget

Clearsaleing has launched The American Attribution Index, designed to help online marketers allocate their marketing funds according to the most effective forms of advertising.

They've released aggregate indices for Q1 2009 (pdf) for small, medium and large advertisers defined in the following manner:

AAI: Aggregate--Large Advertisers (> $2 million/year online ad spend)
AAI: Aggregate--Medium Advertisers ($300k to $2 million/year online ad spend)
AAI: Aggregate--Small Advertisers (< $300k/year online ad spend)

Here's how it broke down (key first):

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Online Video Streams Increase 41% in August 2009

Nielsen Online has released new online video streaming data for August 2009. In news which should surprise no one, online video streaming is up.

The number of videos watched increased 41% last month compared to August of 2008. Unique viewers were up 18% and vids per viewer were up 19.6%.

Here's how it broke down among the video sites:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 15, 2009

The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns

At SES San Jose 2009, one of my favorite sessions was entitled, "The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns."

This major B2B research initiative was conducted by Enquiro Research with input from Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo and DemandBase. So, the session was moderated by Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro, and the speakers included: Mark McMaster, Senior Planner of B2B and Technology Markets at Google, Ben Hanna, VP Marketing at Business.com, Susan Scarth, VP Marketing at Demandbase, Jon Miller, VP Marketing at Marketo, and Dr. Matthias Blume, Chief Analytics Officer at Covario.

Their findings showed that most marketers aren't effectively leveraging online assets to their best potential. Among other things, the notion of a strictly followed, traditional buying funnel is simply not accurate. In many instances, risk dictates buying behavior. In many high risk, complex purchases, search is incredibly important as an integrator across online and offline channels and face-to-face persuasion is still necessary.

The BuyerSphere project looked at how online strategies became artificially separated from traditional best practices, how they can be more effectively integrated, and the part search plays as a major influencer. This panel reviewed the research from over 100 face-to-face interviews, hundreds of eye tracking sessions and over 3,000 survey responses in total.

The project represents a major step forward in understanding B2B buyer patterns and the part online marketing can play in influencing them.

Following the session, I interviewed Hotchkiss about the BuyerSphere Project. He said B2B marketers are frustrated as marketing decisions are not based on rational decision making. Risk and fear play huge roles in B2B buying.

Hotchkiss discussed the "buying funnel" and its history, but concluded it's not a workable model. For more information, go to the B2B BuyerSphere or watch the video interview below.

Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro at SES San Jose 2009 discussing Buyersphere Project

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 14, 2009

Google Commands Attention Span in Internet Use Minutes for Brazil, India

Think Google dominates in the US? Well, according to new comScore data, internet users in Brazil and India are even more Googley-eyed. In those countries, almost 30% of total time spent online is spent with Google.

The United States doesn't even crack the top ten when it comes to minutes spent on Google. The global average is 9.4%.

Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America offered up his thoughts on why it's Brazil and India that are so Google-icious.

As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets. Google's prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking.

By the way, these minutes include Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa - all of Google's sites.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 2, 2009

Colleges and Universities Suck at SEO According to Wordstream Study

Whenever I get the whim to consider going back to school, I, of course, turn to search. I'm often completely appalled by the quality of websites associated with colleges and universities. There is little continuity of design and message and site search is generally terrible. Why go back to school when a university can't even create a decent website?

That's why I'm glad that Wordstream has released their list of top colleges and universities with regards to SEO. Optimization isn't everything when it comes to web design and development, but it's a start.

It should surprise no one that online-based higher education ranks high on Wordstream's list. (Before you balk, consider that a recent study by the US Department of Education showed that online education beats classroom learning.)

Drexel University, a traditional university with a strong online offering, was the big winner with the most top 10 results. Two online schools, University of Phoenix and Capella University were the only other colleges to have strong top 10 showings.

Wordstream conducted the rankings by searching for popular higher-ed keywords such as "psychology degree," "MBA," and "nursing degree."

Their conclusion that most schools aren't conducting SEO or enough SEO didn't surprise me. (It's a bit ironic, since many link builders would love inbounds from a .edu.)

Of course, as I said above, this doesn't even take into account design and most developmental issues. I'd argue that a nice chunk of incoming freshmen computer science geeks could team up with some design majors and probably code up a better website than most universities have.

Is it true that those who can't do, teach? Sound off in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 26, 2009

SEO Remains Steady While PPC, Email and Direct Increase

Engine Ready has released another study revealing the growth rates among various traffic referrers. While SEO showed the least amount of growth in conversion rates and value per visit, it also showed the least amount of decline in order value, which is significant in this economy.

For conversion rates and average value per visit, the data mimicked results from an earlier study conducted in 2008: big growth across the board, except for SEO.

But when Engine Ready took a look at the average order value (AOV), things had changed. PPC was no longer the highest AOV, surpassed by direct access/bookmark as well as other referrers.

SEO declined the least, which supports the theory that these changes are a reaction to the economy. While SEO does cost money if you hire a consultant or retain an in-house employee, there are no extra charges for ad buys as there would be for PPC.

What do you think of Engine Ready's study? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

August 24, 2009

Blogs Increase Traffic, Links and Indexing According to Hubspot Study

Ok, you've heard of this blogging thing, heard it might help your business but you're just not sure if it will *really* bring results. A new Hubspot study will have you publishing a blog faster than you can say "55% more visitors."

Why would you say that? Because that's the average increase in visitors to small business websites as a result of blogging, according to the study.

That's not all.

Small businesses with blogs experienced an average of 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.

So, yes, blogging has SEO value. All of this, as you can imagine, gives a nice little lift to conversions as well, though the study didn't have hard numbers on that.

What are you waiting for? Go get your blogging on! (Then come back and read more. Perhaps, more about blogging. Say, for example how Social Networks and Blogs have surpassed email in popularity or how Blogging is helping at least one newspaper weather the current print journalism crisis Oh - and don't miss out on SEW expert Ron Jones' two part series on blogging (part 1 and part 2).

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

August 13, 2009

Study Shows ROI Improvements in Bing Over Live Search

Organic, Inc. has released the results of an ROI study of Bing. The study was conducted using Organic's proprietary analytics models: Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) and Spend Plan Optimization Tool (SPOT).

The study compared Bing's performance to Live Seaerch's over a two week period. A 23% lift in ROI was found.

"Just to give you perspective, we get excited about a 5 percent lift in ROI on any given search initiative," said Steve Kerho, SVP of Media, Analytics, and Marketing Optimization, Organic. "A 23 percent lift in ROI translates to millions of dollars a month in returned marketing value."

Organic says that Bing's user interface is likely responsible for the lift. While a two-week study is hardly conclusive and comScore data shows little market share increase for Bing, this study shows that Bing could in fact be more valuable to marketers and searchers even if/when no market share is gained.

What do you think of Organic's study? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 14, 2009

Branding, Online Reviews, and Word-of-Mouth Most Trusted Forms of Advertising, According to Nielsen

Nielsen is releasing data showing that recommendations from friends and family top the list of most trusted forms of advertising, with online reviews and branding topping the list as well.

Here's how ad trust has changed over the past two years:

But what is the reason for the change?

"The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years - we are now tracking over 100 million CGM sources - means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company."

You can read the entire report here (PDF).

What do you think is the cause for the shifts in ad trust? Share your opinion in the comments below?

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 13, 2009

Adgooroo Q2 2009 Search Ad Report Shows Market Stability, Despite Bing

Adgooroo has released their quarterly search engine advertising report, and despite the launch of Bing in June, things have remained pretty much the same.

Keep in mind that quarter two includes April and May, during which Microsoft's search was still Live Search. However, the report lobs them all under the title of Bing, and is comparing past data to Live Search. Let's dive in.

For the year ending June 2009, Microsoft grew advertiser base by 35%, but Google still outpaced them by growing theirs by 52%. Yahoo! fared worse than both by only growing their base by 14%.

The share of advertisers among Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft has remained largely unchanged.

The number of first page ads on Microsoft search products dropped by 24%. Meanwhile, the number of ads per keyword are still on the rise for Google and Yahoo! internationally. In the U.S., Microsoft and Yahoo! are seeing declines in the average number of ads per keyword while Google remains on the rise.

Keep in mind that a reduction in ads per keyword could indicate better ad quality.

Below is a list of the top 25 advertisers per search engine for June 2009, according to Adgooroo. The list is in alphabetical order and is calculated on impressions and not ad spend.

What do you think of the Adgooroo Q2 2009 report? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 9, 2009

Bing's Search Engine Share on the Rise, Has a Long Way to Go

Hitwise has released their search engine share data for the month of June 2009. This is significant because it's the first month that Microsoft's Bing.com has been around. Of course, it essentially took over for Live.com, so there are a few factors to look at.

Now, normally we wouldn't look (or even get) the week-by-week data. But that is quite possibly the most significant for this particular month. As you can see, Bing saw growth every week in the month of June.

But when you average the weeks together, Microsoft search engines still saw a slight loss year-over-year. This contrasts the data from the less authoritative Statcounter, which was released July 1.

Still, it's no doubt who's still sending traffic by way of search referrals: Google.

Perhaps overall search referrals would be higher if only searchers could really find what they're looking for. The keyword length is on the rise, possibly indicating that searchers really have to do a lot of work to find what they're truly searching for.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 6, 2009

High Shipping Costs Top List of Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

PayPal has released new survey data showing why online consumers leave their shopping carts behind. Survey participants were asked to tell which reasons were "very important" in abandoning their purchases.

High shipping charges: 46%
Wanted to comparison shop: 37%
Lack of money: 36 percent
Wanted to look for a coupon: 27%
Wanted to shop offline: 26%
Couldn't find preferred pay option: 24%
Item was unavailable at checkout: 23%
Couldn't find customer support: 22%
Concerned about security of credit card data: 21%

The price tag associated with the average abandoned shopping cart was $109. That's a number merchants should be concerned about.

"Merchants who don't welcome back abandoners with open arms are leaving hundreds of dollars per shopper on the table," added Davis. "Merchants need to remember the items that customers abandon and make it easy for them to buy when they return. Sweetening the deal with free shipping, coupons and special discounts is also a great way to encourage online shoppers to complete their purchases."

I can attest that exorbitant shipping costs. I was recently shopping online for a certain type of single cup coffee packs. While I found a great price, the shipping costs made the total cost higher than purchasing offline.

You have to make shopping online more appealing than offline if you want shoppers to complete the purchase process. Since shopping online requires people to wait for delivery, price is where you must be competitive.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

July 1, 2009

Bing Continues Microsoft Search Share Growth in June 2009, According to StatCounter

StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing's first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they're making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June.

Overall, things are relatively steady, but there's an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share.

The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April.

One percent growth over the last two months may not seem significant, but it could be the beginning of momentum.

"At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date."

Plus, the 1% growth has come at the expense of Google. The search mammoth saw its search engine share according to StatCounter decline by 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June.

By the way, despite that first week of traffic for Bing, Yahoo! still retained its second place status for the entire month of June. Yahoo!'s traffic has remained fairly steady over the past three months in StatCounter data.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 25, 2009

Twitter Growth Tapers Off in May 2009

It's been an explosive year of growth for Twitter, with celebrities and the media embracing the microblogging social network. Oprah featured Twitter on her show and crowned Ashton Kutcher the King of Twitter after he became the first person to gain 1 million followers.

But new Nielsen data shows that growth tapered off in the month of May, when traffic "only" grew by 7% over April.

Don't get out your Kleenex, though. Twitter's year-over-year growth was a whopping 1,448% year-over-year, growing from 1.2 million uniques in May 2008 to 18.2 million in May 2009.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 23, 2009

Social Media Show Big Search Jumps, Google Drops For May The comScore's monthly numbers show a drop in growth for Google, Yahoo and MSN, yet an increase for social sites Facebook and Craigslist over last month was noted. Google's numbers fell to 65% of search share - a 2% drop from last month - while Craigslist gained 12 percent. comScore Expanded Search Query Report May 2009 vs. April 2009 Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch

Expanded Search Entity Search Queries (MM) Apr-09 May-09 Percent Change May-09 vs. Apr-09 Total Expanded Search 22,067 21,818 -1% Google Sites 13,041 13,035 0% Google 9,830 9,680 -2% YouTube/All Other 3,211 3,355 4% Yahoo! Sites 3,161 3,021 -4% Yahoo! 3,135 2,995 -4% All Other 26 26 0% Microsoft Sites* 1,250 1,194 -4% MSN-Windows Live 1,158 1,103 -5% Microsoft/All Other 92 91 -1% AOL LLC 795 721 -9% AOL Search Network 427 374 -12% MapQuest/All Other 368 347 -6% Ask Network 705 691 -2% Ask.com 402 382 -5% MyWebSearch.com/ All Other 303 309 2% craigslist, inc. 583 651 12% Fox Interactive Media 666 644 -3% MySpace Sites 658 636 -3% All Other 8 8 0% eBay 654 634 -3% Amazon Sites 188 185 -2% Facebook.com 176 184 5%

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 22, 2009

Display Ads, Social Media Marketing Grow Despite Obstacles

When the economy started going south, many expected mediums such as paid search to be the winners - if there were any - in the advertising industry. Being able to track conversions would be crucial in an uncertain economy. But two new data releases are showing that display ads and social media are weathering the storm.

First up, display advertising for consumer goods is up 57% since 2007, according to Nielsen Online. YouTube and AOL.com are experiencing some of the greatest growth at 572% and 179% from Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 respectively.

While display ads typically don't convert as well as paid search on their own, we know that display ads combined with paid search perform better than either one as a silo.

Next up is social media. Results from a new Sapient study reveal that 65% of marketers say it's easier to secure funds for a new media/social media campaign than it was a year ago due to the economy.

However, there are reservations. 77% expressed concern over the performance at least one of their social media campaigns. Still, only 6% said that they would cut social media dollars if they had to in just one area.

Clearly, social media is at play, but marketers are still trying to figure out how to best leverage the medium. Considering that social media, more than most forms of advertising, relies on the actions of consumers to deliver the creative, it's easy to see why marketers are having trouble taming the beast. On the flip side, considering social networking is so hot right now, it's easy to see why they still want to play.

What are your thoughts on these data sets? Share your reaction in the comments below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 16, 2009

Live Search's Last Month a Bummer But Bing Shows Promise According to Nielsen

May 2009 was the last full month of Microsoft's Live Search and it certainly did not go out with a bang. It was the only one of the top 5 search engines to experience negative growth year-over-year.

But Bing's early June launch shows early promise for Microsoft's new "decision engine."

Image via Nielsen Online blog

Bing doubled LIve Search's unique numbers in week one, plus increased search share from 8.7% to 14.7%.

Image via Nielsen Online blog

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 2, 2009

Minutes Online: Facebook, Tagged and Twitter Soars While MySpace Struggles

Nielsen Online has released new data showing minutes spent on social networks for the month of April 2009. Compared to April 2008, most of the top 10 social networks are seeing skyrocketing growth while MySpace sees a decline.

The news is not all bad for MySpace. Video is its silver lining. MySpace topped the list of networks for most minutes streaming video (384 million) and average minutes per viewer (38.8). While MySpace is already a YouTube competitor, perhaps it should reposition itself as more aligned with video? (Share your thoughts on that below in the comments).

Of course, Facebook topped the list of overall minutes. A site to watch is Tagged.com, which is seeing more engagement that Twitter, which gets a ton of buzz. And Google's Blogger enjoyed a steady 30% annual growth.

Here's the chart comparing total engagement from April 2008 to April 2009:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Twitter's Glass Ceilings and Its 90/10 Problem

New Twitter stats from the Harvard Business School reveal interesting demographics surrounding the popular social chat network. Unlike other social networks, it's very male-centric and it's more like Wikipedia than Facebook. Let's dive into the data.

Men are more likely to follow men and have reciprocal relationships. Women are also more likely to follow men, despite women making up the majority of Twitter users at 55%.

Men also have 15% more followers than women.

It's the exact opposite on other social networking sites. Generally, both men and women are more likely to follow content produced by women.

But it's the top Twitterers who really tempt the Fail Whale. 90% of Tweets are written by 10% of the most prolific Twitterers. About half of Twitter users are tweeting just once every 74 days.

In most social networks, 10% of the top content producers account for 30% of all content produced.

Twitter is more like Wikipedia, whose top 15% contributors produce 90% of the content. The study's authors, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, suggest that Twitter is a one-to-many conversation tool like Wikipedia rather than it is a peer-to-peer social network.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 1, 2009

Social Profile Sites, Mobile Social Networking More Popular than Twitter Among 18-24 Year Olds

Twitter may be enjoying some nice traffic trends in recent months, but they're going to have to work harder to win over 18-24 year olds. Sites like Facebook and MySpace along with mobile social networking fare much better with this demographic.

99% of those surveyed say they have a profile on a social networking site. 89% have downloaded an application on that site. 89% have also used the photo features while 53% have played games on the site.

That's much more than the 22% who are using Twitter.

38% of this demographic have an iPhone or an iPod touch. Of those, 53% play games, 35% use entertainment apps and 31% use lifestyle apps. 26% don't use any apps.

The data was released by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN). The study was conducted in May 2009 and included 200 participants. The Lubin School of Business' Interactive and Direct Marketing (IDM) Lab at Pace University partnered with PMN for the study.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 29, 2009

Lyrics, Free Downloads are Among McAfee's Most Dangerous Searches

Security technology company McAfee has identified the world's most dangerous search terms. They searched 2,600 keywords culled from several of the top keyword lists from sources such as search engines and Hitwise. They then ranked them based on risky downloads, browser exploits, email practices, phishing, excessive popups, and linking practices.

The risk for your average search results is low, at just 1.7%. That means if your search returns 250 results, about 4 of them are risky.

But there are certain categories and terms that are more risky than others. Searching for something with the word "free" attached turns out to be a risky venture indeed. Want lyrics to a song? 1 in 4 of the results for an average lyrics search are risky.

Here are the most risky categories as determined by McAfee:

In the United States, these are the most risky keywords:

Globally, one of the most risky searches that can be conducted is for "free work at home" schemes. With the current economic crisis, these search terms may be quite tempting, but they're probably not worth the risk.

McAfee also analyzed risk based on keyword variations. Here is a list of risky root words when looking at variations:

What do you think of this data from McAfee? Leave a comment below to let us know.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 27, 2009

Android, iPhone Web Requests Higher Than Their Market Share

AdMob has released its April 2009 mobile metric report and, as expected, the iPhone is rocking the mobile web. While it doesn't dominate the market share for handset sales (yet?), it does produce the most mobile web requests. The iPhone comprised 8% of smartphone market share, but generated 43% of ad mobile ad requests last month.

Android has similar stats, but on a much smaller scale. Android consisted of 1% of smartphone sales but generated 3% of mobile ad requests.

Smartphones on a whole generate far more web requests than their market share. They only make up about 12% of sales but 35% of AdMob's ad requests. Phones using the Symbian operating system (primarily Nokia phones) enjoyed 52% of handset sales in April 2009, but only generated 36% of mobile web requests.

24% of April's requests were made over a WiFi network. The top 5 devices making Wifi requests were:

iPhone
iPod touch
Sony PSP
HTC Dream
HTC Dash

Compared to March, global web requests were down 2% for April, but compared to April last year, mobile web requests are skyrocketing:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 15, 2009

Google, Microsoft Increase Search Share in Nielsen April 2009 Rankings

Google search grew 7.8% and Microsoft grew 72% in Nielsen Online's April 2009 search market share rankings. Yahoo! and AOL did not fare as well, declining 2.8% and 8.8% respectively. Ask.com saw some nice growth at 5.9%. Here are the top 10:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 14, 2009

Hulu Grows 490% in 1 Year, According to Nielsen

Hulu has seen explosive growth since its launch last year, according to data from Nielsen Online. The online video site, which features television programming, grew a whopping 490% year-over-year in April. Here are the top online video sites for last month, with YouTube maintaining its number one position:

The demographic that has seen the most growth is the 35-49 age bracket with second place belonging to (drum roll please) the 65+ set. That's right. Your grandma is getting her Hulu on.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 8, 2009

Nielsen Data Shows Continued Influence of Moms Online

We've known for awhile that moms are a force to be reckoned with online. New data from Nielsen Online shows that the trend continues.

Nielsen defines "Power Moms" as women aged 25-54 with at least one child. These women represent almost 20% of the online population.
Established Moms (aged 40-50 with 3+ kids) are heavy online shoppers. Shopzilla.com is their most popular shopping site.
Newbie Moms (aged 35-34 with 1-2 kids) also shop online, but are more into social networking.

"Mom bloggers review everything from beauty products to cars to inkjets, enabling marketers unparalled reach to their target consumers. In an increasingly connected world, moms seek the wisdom of their online counterparts as trusted advisors," said Jessica Hogue, research director, Nielsen Online.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 13, 2009

Yahoo! First Page Advertisers Increase by 10% in Q1 2009

When Yahoo! announced that its quarterly earnings will be released Tuesday, April 21, I mentioned that it could be too soon to see any changes due to the installation of a new CEO in Carol Bartz. But, hopefully, I might be wrong.

AdGooroo has released its first quarter search engine data and they're showing Yahoo! as seeing an almost 10% increase in first page advertisers. Check out the chart below. Google and Microsoft both saw some decreases in at least one of the first three months of 2009. Yahoo! saw only gains.

"Unlike findings from previous reports, Google's Ad Coverage diverged significantly from its estimated growth in active advertisers in Q109. We haven't seen this in our analysis until now," said AdGooroo Founder and Chief Gooroo Rich Stokes.

Still, Google maintains a stronghold on the search advertising share:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

Search Drives 5th Consecutive Record Setting Year in Internet Advertising

Despite the economic decline of 2008, internet advertising reached $23.4 billion, setting a new record high. Records have been set for five consecutive years, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Search grew 19% over 2007, maintaining its role as the driving force behind the continued (yet slowed) growth in internet advertising.

Meanwhile, digital video is on the rise, more than doubling revenues from $324 million in 2007 to $734 million in 2008.

The fourth quarter of 2008 was the first time a single quarter surpassed $6 billion.

"We are seeing an ongoing secular shift from traditional to online media as marketers recognize that ad dollars invested in interactive media are effective at influencing consumers and delivering measurable results," said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. "In this uncertain economy, where marketers know they need to do more with less, interactive advertising provides the tools for them to build deep, engaging relationships with consumers--the experience marketers gain from this will deliver dividends especially after the economy turns around."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 19, 2009

Mobile Internet News & Info Grows 107%, Mobile Social Grows 427% in 1 year

comScore has released quite the interesting data on the growing trend of mobile internet usage. It seems daily usage among unique users has grown over 100% from January of 2008 to January of 2009.

But get this - that's just the number for accessing news and information. It doesn't even include social networking. With mobile Facebook and Twitter apps, it's no surprise that the growth rate in that space is monumental:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 11, 2009

Conductor Releases Study About Fortune 500 and Natural Search Trends

SEO measurement firm Conductor has released new data revealing natural search trends and their relationship to Fortune 500 firms. This data is particularly enlightening in the wake of a recent Google algorithm change, which many feel favors brands (but Matt Cutts denies).

The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $51 million / day on 88,792 keywords - yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
Large brand visibility is improving throughout natural search results, but even high performers struggle with inconsistent execution across brands.
Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. In all cases these companies had domains with significant visibility issues that offset their overall score.
46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.
Fortune 500 natural search visibility dropped 5.8% when search queries increased to 5 or more words.

"SEO is still in its infancy for the Fortune 500. From quarter to quarter you can easily see when brands and sectors have become effective in managing natural search," said Conductor CEO, Seth Besmertnik. "We're excited to be tracking the progress of these companies as the nascent search industry evolves."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 10, 2009

Social Networking and Blogs Surpass Email in Popularity

With 67% of the worldwide internet population visiting, social networks and blogs are now outpacing email in popularity. They've become the 4th most popular online category, according to Nielsen Online.

"Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience," says John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online. "While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing. Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large. This study explains why."

Here are some more interesting nuggets of information on the matter from Nielsen:

One in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites.
The social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age: the biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to "Member Community" Web sites globally came from the 35-49 year old age group (+11.3 million).
Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking. Nielsen found UK mobile Web users have the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset, with 23 percent (2 million people) doing so, compared to 19 percent in the US (10.6 million people). These numbers are a big increase over last year - up 249 percent in the UK and 156 percent in the US.

Does this mean people will start responding to social media marketing over email marketing? Only time will tell. So will you when you leave a comment below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

March 4, 2009

Gen Y's Notice Social Network Ads, Claim Indifference

In a recent episode of the TNT show "Trust Me" about an advertising agency in Chicago, the Creative Director's teenage daughter claimed she wasn't affected by advertising. He asked her why she chose to purchase Nike athletic shoes. She said "I don't know, I just did it." The clever dad retorted, "Just Do It. Where have I heard that before?"

The scene, whether it tried to or not, depicted the reality of how people feel about advertising: the notice it but claim to be unaffected by it.

The latest data released by PMN shows just how real this sentiment is among the Gen Y demographic:

62 percent of Gen Y's have visited a brand or fan page on a social network, but only 48 percent have joined
84 percent noticed ads on social networks, 74 percent say they click infrequently/never (36 percent saying they don't click on ads at all).
Only 19 percent say they find ads on social networks relevant.
51 percent say they'd prefer a separate social network to manage their brand interactions.

But does that mean social network ads (which are primarily display ads) completely worthless? Many online marketers know that display ads can play an important role in the marketing funnel. This means that people may not click on display ads, but it can drive them to search. In other words, display ads are good for branding.

This brings us back to the Gen Y-ers. They may find display ads "irrelevant" when they're just surfing their social network, but when they go to make a purchase, they'll likely "Just Do It" without even realizing why.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Online Consumer Spending Drops in February 2009

Consumer spending in February 2009 dropped significantly from January, according to a report by Coremetrics. Those who shopped online during February purchased 13% fewer items. Website sessions that resulted in purchases declined by 3%.

Page views per session dropped 1%, product views per session dropped 2.5% and average time on site went down 4.5%.

The report also found:

Gifts retailers and Jewelers -- both traditional winners on Valentine's Day -- reported 23% and 15% increases in order sessions respectively. However, the average dollar value of those orders did not match these increases, with a modest increase of 4% for gifts retailers and a decrease of 14.3% for jewelers. These numbers illustrate that even on those occasions when consumers want to spend, they are spending in a more restrained fashion than in the past.
Department stores were hit hard by a 13% drop in shopping cart sessions and a near 10% drop in order sessions. However, department stores did an excellent job of appealing to a smaller group of consumers, reporting increases of 2% and 13.4% in the average number of items per order and their average dollar value.
Apparel, Health and Beauty, Home Goods, Outdoor Goods and Specialty retailers all reported decreases in order sessions of 12.6%, 9.6%, 5.2%, 10.8% and 7.2% respectively.

"The online economy is reflecting what is happening in the broader markets," said John Squire, chief strategy officer for Coremetrics. "Consumers are being increasingly selective about when and where they make their online purchases, which means that we can't expect the online sector to power us out of this recession over night. That's why retailers are becoming more analytical about launching marketing programs that aggressively target consumers with personalized, relevant promotions designed to get them to open their wallets."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 23, 2009

61% of Reluctant Consumers Can Be Positively Swayed Online

It seems like the news about the economy gets worse by the day. If it has you scratching your head (or ripping out your hair) trying to figure out what your online marketing strategy should be in the coming years, don't get discouraged just yet.

In a survey conducted by Jupiter Research for Bazaarvoice and richrelevance, 61% of reluctant shoppers said they could be positively swayed by online shopping resources.

The niches most affected by hesitation are:

Automotive - 50%
Travel - 46%
Electronics - 43%

Consumers are shopping around and leaving their options open. 42% visited 3 or more sites to research their last purchase, and only 33% of online shoppers had made up their minds about the price they were willing to pay for their purchase in advance of going online to research.

That leaves some good wiggle room for sites and brands to compete. Before researching:

31% had made up their minds on which item or title to choose
23% knew which brand they wanted to buy
16% knew which store they would purchase from
13% knew when they would make their purchase

Once online, they trust the reviews and opinions of other consumers, so make sure your product offering is solid.

77% look to user ratings and reviews
66% use recommendations based on other consumers' purchasing
65% use recommendations based on browsing behavior of fellow consumers

These numbers are also a very good reason why you have to keep an eye on your brand's online reputation. Bazaarvoice knows this and their efforts at reputation management have paid off.

"Shoppers trust and use the opinions of others in making choices about products and brands," said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. "As consumers head to the web to research online and offline purchases, companies have a tremendous opportunity to provide them with the authentic user-generated content that is proven to build confidence, increase satisfaction, and drive sales. The benefits of user-generated content are amplified in a bad economy, and this is why 9 out of 10 of the Internet Retailer Top 50 who outsource reviews choose Bazaarvoice." Related Reading: Bazaarvoice Lets Brands Push Ratings to E-Commerce Partners SLI Systems Joins Bazaarvoice Radius to Help Marketers Execute Integrated Social Commerce Strategies Bazaarvoice Syndicates Merchant Reviews to Shopping Portals

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 19, 2009

Yahoo! Steals Search Share from Google in January 2009

Yahoo! gained 0.5 percentage points in comScore search engine rankings for January 2009. Google just happened to lose the same amount of percentage points during the same month.

But they're not the only two swapping points. Microsoft stole 0.2% from Ask.com.

These are small percentage points, so things mostly stayed steady. If these trends were to keep up, that's when things could get a little interesting. So, stay tuned. In the meantime, here's the raw data:

YouTube is still giving Yahoo! a run for its money.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 11, 2009

Nielson Online Releases January 2009 Search Engine Share Rankings

Google experience 40% year-over-year growth in the number of searches in January 2009, according to Nielsen Online. Live Search experienced 18% year-over-year growth, but gained 2 percentage points over last month. Yahoo! grew a modest 8.7% year-over year, while the overall growth for all search engines was 27.5%.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 9, 2009

Kayak.com Releases Winter Vacation Survey Data

Travel search site Kayak.com has released data about the intentions of Americans for winter vacations. In a tough economy, you might think that winter vacations are on the chopping block, but 76% of consumers still plan to get away this winter.

The news isn't all good as 50% said the credit crunch will have them taking fewer trips this winter. Of course, price will be an important factor. 77% said price and value will be the biggest factors in determining their winter trips.

Strategies being employed in planning a cost-effective trip include:

Opting for domestic travel destinations over those abroad
Taking advantage of off-season pricing rather than escaping to the Caribbean in the high season
Choosing a destination that offers a free place to stay.

"People are still interested in traveling over the coming months, but we've seen they're spending more time searching, comparing and discussing vacation decisions with traveling companions," Brian Harniman, Kayak.com EVP of marketing and distribution said. "The good news is that deals on winter and spring getaways are more plentiful than we've seen in recent years. Airlines are launching winter fare sales that are lasting through spring. Hotels are lowering prices and adding value components such as free nights and vouchers for entertainment and dining."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 29, 2009

Yahoo's Search Ad Share Drops 40% in UK for Q4 2008

Yahoo's Q4 UK search advertising share dropped from 13.9 percent in 2007 to 8.4 percent in 2008, a 40% decline. Making things worse is that UK search ad spend actually increased by 11% during the fourth quarter.

Advertisers apparently shifted their dollars to Google, who saw an increase from 82.6 in 2007 to 88.2 in 2008. Microsoft held steady, coming in with a 3.4 percent share in 2008.

These numbers were released by Efficient Frontier and include contextual advertising. Yahoo's dismal performance may be one reason they decided to shut down their Content Match program in Europe earlier this month.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 27, 2009

Top 10 Newspaper Sites See 16% Growth in December 2008 Web Traffic

Newspapers may be struggling these days but it's not for lack of web traffic, at least for the top ten newspaper sites. According to Nielsen Online, web traffic to the top 10 sites grew by an average of 16% in December 2008. Only one of the top 10 properties, Boston.com, saw a decline in web traffic:

"Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth," commented Chuck Schilling, research director, agency & media, Nielsen Online. "News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama's latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 20, 2009

Google Holds, Yahoo Gains Search Ad Share in Q4 2008, According to Efficient Frontier

Efficient Frontier has released a search engine advertising report for the fourth quarter of 2008. They found that Google held onto its 76% market share while Yahoo gained 3%.

Here are additional trends they found:

Large vs. Small Advertisers: Small advertisers in the U.S. accounted for a greater decrease in search advertising spend than larger, more established brands. Advertisers spending less than $50,000 per month cut spending by 23 percent year-over-year, with many of the cuts coming between Q3 and Q4 of 2008. Companies that spent more than $200,000 per month only reduced spending by 9 percent over the same time period. These margins are typical during a recession when larger, more sophisticated brands aggressively utilize the search channel to drive revenue and sales while strengthening their position.
Overall Impression Trends: Overall impressions for search engines are down 6 percent year-over-year. From Q4 2007 to Q4 2008, Google experienced a 3 percent decrease, while Yahoo lost 13 percent impression volume. Microsoft Live garnered 21 percent more impressions in Q4 than in Q3 2008 and gained 18 percent more impressions year-over-year.
Click-Through Rate Trends: Overall click-through-rates (CTRs) in search were relatively flat year-over-year, gaining only 2 percent. While Microsoft Live Search had higher CTRs than all other search engines from Q1 to Q3 of 2008, it dipped below Google Search in Q4 2008. Google Search CTRs decreased by 2 percent year-over-year, while Yahoo CTRs improved 3 percent year-over-year. Google Content CTRs increased 150 percent year-over-year.
Cost-Per-Click Highlights: Overall search cost-per-click (CPC) is down 5 percent year-over-year. In the last quarter of 2008, Google Search's CPC declined by 8 percent, while Microsoft Live Search declined by 3 percent and Yahoo Search declined by 1 percent. Microsoft Live Search has consistently maintained a higher CPC than all other search engines, indicating that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for a high quality, albeit smaller audience.

Here are some niche-related findings:

Automotive: 15 percent decline in spending over 2007, due primarily to lower impression volume, reflecting weakness in consumer demand.
Finance: 25 percent decline in spend over 2007, with impressions up by 5 percent reflecting high customer demand for financial services, with but fewer qualified conversions.
Retail: 9 percent increase in spend over 2007, reflecting the strength of the channel in price comparison and shopping efficiency, particularly for more established online brands that increased spend to reach revenue goals.
Travel and Entertainment: 24 percent decrease in spend year-over year, primarily due to reduced traffic volume, which is down in by 18 percent in the sector year-over-year.

“Search engine marketing remains the most accountable sales and client acquisition channel on or offline,” said James Beriker, President and CEO of Efficient Frontier. “To continue to achieve stellar results, the current recession has made it even more critical for search marketers to know their metrics and manage campaigns based on actionable market, sales funnel and conversion data. The reason we work with more than 150 of the most sophisticated search marketers in 20 markets worldwide, and manage more spend than any other firm, is that we use math to automate the process of accurately modeling data and making the right overall strategy and keyword bidding decisions to deliver optimal performance, no matter the market dynamics.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 15, 2009

Nielsen Online December 2008 Search Engine Share Rankings

Nielsen Online has released its search engine share rankings for December 2008. Google had a big year-over-year gain with Yahoo, AOL and Ask seeing modest increases as well. Live Search didn't fare so well:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 12, 2009

Women Aged 30-39 Spend Most Time Viewing Internet and TV Simultaneously

A new report from Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) shows that the group that women aged 30-39 are the group that spends the most time viewing the internet and television simultaneously. In second place are teenage boys aged 15-18.

Here's the breakdown:

"Considering the amount of sports-related programming that connects the Web to television, it was surprising to see the highest simultaneous usage was among adult women," said Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI. "Our interpretation of this is that women are more inclined to multi-task than men, particularly when in the home balancing their personal and professional lives. This is entirely consistent with studies of online television consumption previously conducted by IMMI."

Maybe, but considering teenage men were almost the same as the women, I'm not sure such generalizations are true. Plus, as those men grow older, will they carry their habits with them?

And are those teenage women texting on their phones instead of viewing the internet, while watching tv? Will that translate into mobile internet viewing while tv watching as they grow older, possibly obtaining more sophisticated phones?

What do you think about this data? Let us know in the comments section!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Internet TV: What Do Users Want?

Last week at CES, several TVs that were internet-capable were rolled out for the world to see. So what do consumers plan on using their TV internet browsers for?

Strategy Analytics set out to find out in a recent survey.

The number one answer? Video on-demand. This should come as surprise to absolutely no one as online video has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Here are the top 8 answers from the survey:

Access Video on Demand without a PC
Searching the home network for video content
Access user-generated content such as Youtube
Play media from a USB drive
Share television experience using messaging services
Make video conference or voice calls via the TV
Download widgets
Give the TV different colour schemes or skins (Note: Selected applications only)

David Mercer, VP, Digital Consumer Practice, comments: "It's perhaps not surprising that TV viewers want to be able to watch video and TV on the big screen. But many of today's early web TV services are focusing too heavily on what they perceive as hot internet technologies such as widgets. Our research suggests these are a low priority for many consumers; instead developers should focus on bringing TV viewers the wealth of video content that is available on the web."

Mercer is right. The only concurrent news with the devices was about the Yahoo! Widget Channel.

Marketers, however, can take note from these survey results. Pursuing video is increasingly becoming a must, with creative that goes beyond traditional advertising. Including user-generated content is a great way to engage that pursuit, something that brands have already been trying with great success. Doritos annual Superbowl campaign is a great example.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 9, 2009

Web Analytics Association Releases 2009 Outlook Survey Data

The Web Analytics Association has released data from a survey conducted about analytics proffesionals' plans for the coming year. Here's what they found:

Over 40 percent of respondents see funding as the biggest challenge in 2009, the investment outlook is positive
Over 96 percent of respondents indicated that they plan to increase or maintain current spending on web analytics in 2009. According to the survey, the budget increases will primarily be used to boost web analytics training.
Roughly 81 percent of respondents plan to invest in consulting and staffing to help make the most out of their existing analytics tools and take action on the data they provide to improve web site performance and boost ROI from online marketing campaigns.
Over 41 percent indicated they will be investing in add-on tools such as behavioral targeting and paid search.
Over 65 percent of respondents revealed a demand to have business decisions driven by analytics, a top web analytics initiative in 2009

What do you think of the results? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Related Reading: Web Analytics Association Asks for Public Comment on New Standard Definitions Web Analytics Association Adds Yahoo's Mortenson to Board of Directors New Board of Directors for the Web Analytics Association

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 8, 2009

Web Application Delays of 5 Seconds or More Significantly Affect Business Performance

If you have web applications as part of a linking strategy or other online marketing strategy, be sure you don't have delays of 5 seconds or more. That's the moment when business performance really starts being affected, according to new data released by Aberdeen Group.

For every second after the 5 second mark:

Page views decline by 11%
Conversations decline by 7%
Overall customer satisfaction decreases by 16%.

"As the importance of managing performance of Web applications is increasing, some of the power that traditionally was reserved for technology vendors is shifting to the end-user side," states Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen. "Going forward, market leaders in this space will be defined not by features and functionalities of technology solutions, but by the willingness to understand end-users' expectations, usage patterns and needs for new types of Web content."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 7, 2009

Paid Search Spend up 12% in Q4 2008

Paid search spending was up 12% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same quarter in 2007, according to SearchIgnite.

We've been hearing that advertising dollars were being shifted online, with the strategy accelerated by the rough economy. But is that trend slowing?

SearchIgnite says October's spend was up by 15% and November was up by 43% year-over-year. But December's spend dropped 14% from the previous year.

It could be a reaction to consumer behavior. Conversion rates increased by 11% in October, but dropped 2% in November. They went back up in December but just by a 4% increase.

Still, Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite, suggests that in all the confusion there is opportunity for the technologically innovative.

“Retailers were more aggressive with their paid search spend in the first half of the quarter compared with the year earlier in an effort to capture more consumer dollars ahead of the holidays.” said Barnette. “This is evidence that the challenging and changing economic environment is requiring retail marketers to adjust their online marketing strategies accordingly. As such, tools for testing and understanding how both search and other online media are performing together will become increasingly important for retailers as they look to make more nimble, data-driven decisions about where to allocate their media spend.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 18, 2008

New Wifi Enabled Mobile Devices Drive Increased Wifi Usage

Wifi-enabled mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, G1, and Blackberry Bold are driving the increase in accessing the mobile web via Wifi, according to new data released by Admob.

Last month, mobile web requests via Wifi represented 8% of all mobile web requests. 19% of all mobile web requests were made by Wifi-enabled devices, up from just 9% in August.

Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch dominates the field of total Wifi requests at 78%. In fact, 42% of all web requests from the iPhone are generated on Wifi. But keep in mind that the G1 was just released in the middle of October and one month later was in the top 10 of devices accessing via Wifi. It already represents 7% of total T-Mobile traffic. The Blackberry Bold hasn't cracked the top 10 (yet) but is also a relatively new phone.

Another interesting note is that Sony's portable gaming device, the PlayStation Portable (PSP), generates 13% of all Wifi requests for the mobile web. It's not the only portable gaming device that is Wifi-enabled. The Nintendo DS can access Wifi, but it's not showing up at the top of these lists.

You can download the entire PDF report here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 17, 2008

Online Video Wins the 9-5 Hour, Weekdays

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I know you're busy and all, watching online videos between 9-5 during the week. It's a pleasure that you took the time to stop by when you could be watching vids of cute cats and dancing humans.

At least, that's what you're likely to do according to Nielsen Online.

65% of online video viewers conduct their viewing during business hours. That would be 9-5 weekdays.

51% also engage in the habit during the weekends. You just can't get enough of the tube (the YouTube, that is).

The number of unique viewers dropped by 4 million, but the 120 million of you still sticking around are very loyal to your online video usage. You increased the amount of time spent watching by 10 minutes. That's the length of an Ally McBeal-like dramedy in television years.

Of course, YouTube took top honors as the most watched network. MySpace (owned by Fox Interactive Media) comes in a very distant second followed by NBC's Hulu, which was launched earlier this year (so that no one watches their shows on YouTube.)

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 16, 2008

59% of Small Businesses Don't Do Paid Search Marketing

59% of small businesses with a web site don't do paid search, according to a survey conducted by Microsoft adCenter. 90% of that number haven't even tried. To which I say, "What is up with that people?" That is just leaving money - potentially gobs of it - on the table.

I can't say I'm surprised. Recently, on a trip to the beautiful North Carolina mountains, I was appalled at the lack of paid search listings for small businesses.

Not a single resort conducts a paid search campaign "ski North Carolina" on Live Search, Yahoo or Google. Even the ones from West Virginia could be snagging tourism dollars out of the state, but they're not. None of the resorts are great at optimizing organically either. The first ski resort appears at number 3 in the natural results for both Live Search and Google and #5 on Yahoo!

Perhaps it's because, according to the survey, 70% of small business owners would rather do their own taxes than do paid search.

Now, if you're a small business owner out there who maybe has heard that paid search is something you should do, but you'd rather become an accountant, let me give you some assurance.

I experimented with paid search for the first time this fall. That may sound crazy for someone who blogs on Search Engine Watch, but my background is copywriting, not paid search campaign conducting. I was nervous, but once I did it, I wondered what I had waited for. It was much easier than I anticipated and I can assure you that it's not even close to the awful experience of doing your own taxes.

Besides, like taxes, there are paid search marketing professionals who can do it for you. They know the tips and tricks to help keep costs low and maximize your marketing dollars.

So jump right in, the water's just fine. Or at least, it's frozen enough to ski on.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

December 2, 2008

SEMPO's Annual State of the Market Survey Open Now Open for 2008

It's that time of year. SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) has opened their State of the Market survey to gain (and later give) insight into what SEOs and SEMs are doing with their marketing budgets and strategies.

There are perks for participating, including an 8GB iPod Touch and a free pass to a North Americaan SES Conference to randomy drawn participants. You do not have to be a SEMPO member to participate.

This year, your participation may be more crucial than ever. An uncertain economy has many people guessing, but surveys such as these can help provide tangible realities into what's really going on in search advertising.

“While there are numerous surveys publishing online spend projections, what differentiates the SEMPO survey is its ability to tap into the largest qualified pool of professionals actively engaged in search marketing,” says Kevin Lee, co-founder and executive chairman of Didit, and a founding board member of SEMPO who continues to coordinate this annual research project.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 24, 2008

Retail Search Ad Spend Up 33% So Far in Q4 2008

SearchIgnite has released data showing that the search ad spend for retailers is up 33% so far in the fourth quarter of 2008. The reason appears to be that multi-channel marketers are funneling more money to search, which has strong data on ROI.

“With the current economic climate leading up to the holidays, retailers are looking for ways to capture consumer spend and drive revenue in efficient ways,” said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite.

Q4 spending is also up 58% over Q3 2008. Last year's Q4 was up 40% over Q3 2007. And last year's Q3 didn't have an election to boost it's numbers.

However, consumers are spending less per transaction. Still, the good news is that they are spending online at a steady rate of growth.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 12, 2008

Women Plan to Spend Less this Holidays, First Cuts Going to Themselves

Women are planning to spend less according to two surveys released today.

In a survey by the Marketing to Moms Coalition, moms plan to cut spending on holiday gifts. Offline is expected to be hit the hardest, with an 8% drop over last year. Online will decline by 2%.

87% of moms plan to shop at big discount retailers like Wal-mart and Target
Department stores come in second at 37%.
Shoe and specialty clothing retailers come in third at 35%.

"Older kids tend to want expensive presents like cell phones, video games, trendy clothes and computer equipment," says Maria Bailey, a founder of the Marketing to Moms Coalition, and author of the book, Mom 3.0, Marketing with Today's Mother by Leveraging New Media and Technology. "Moms are telling their older kids that this year, they're just going to have to wait."

Another survey from Frank About Women shows that women (not just moms) are planning to cut holiday spending. First on the chopping block? Themselves.

62% of women are asking friends and family to forgo buying them a gift this year due to the economy.

They asked survey participants who would be cut from the gift list that normally would be on.

57% of those who normally give gifts to their neighbors plan to forego the gift this year
53% will skip their bosses
52% will cut employees and service providers (i.e. hairdressers) from their list
50% won't give gifts to co-workers this year

So, who is getting a gift this year?

96% said they won't let a bad economy stand in the way of giving gifts to their kids
86% will give gifts to their parents
85% will give gifts to their spouse or partner (Stay out of the dog house, guys!)

"Not only are women planning to spend less on others, they are actively encouraging their friends and family to omit them from the gift list this year," says Nicole Green, senior strategic brand planner at FAW. "This self-sacrificing mindset represents a significant cultural shift as a renewed sense of fiscal responsibility and frugality trump spending and splurging for many women. Marketers who speak to the real meaning of the holidays are more likely to resonate with women this season and benefit from their spending power."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 23, 2008

Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth in Purchase Decisions

New data released by Rubicon Consulting shows that online reviews are second only to word of mouth when it comes to influencing consumer purchasing decisions.

Here's other key points from the survey:

The Web is the #2 resource for customer support information, after user manuals. It ranks ahead of calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer.
Website categories that get the most daily usage are search, social communities like MySpace and Facebook, general news websites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com, and online banking.
The websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. Although Yahoo's financial challenges have generated a lot of press attention, it continues to have a very large and loyal following.
Young people (age 22 and under) are much noisier online than their elders. They account for about half of all the content and comments posted online.
Facebook appears to be ahead of MySpace in terms of number of users in the US, and perceived value of the site.
Despite extensive publicity, the community sites SecondLife and Twitter reach only a few percent of US Internet users.
Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they are more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online.

Harry Max, a principal at Rubicon Consulting said, "Many companies downplay the importance of online communities because only a few percent of all Internet users contribute to them heavily. What they don't understand is that most other Internet users read those reviews and rely on them heavily when making purchase decisions. Taking good care of online communities can be a huge money-saver for companies trying to get more marketing impact from limited budgets."

I disagree. I think a lot of companies are interested in online communities but aren't always sure how to engage consumers with them. However, with the economy the way it is, many companies are likely to cut social media first, as we saw in data released just the other day.

The biggest key to making sure you get good online reviews is to have a solid product or service. So, while you're making those efficiencies in order to survive the slow economic times, make sure your products don't suffer. Better yet, create efficient products and services and just watch those positive reviews come in.

To get the ball rolling, you might try pitching a few bloggers - especially mom bloggers if you have a product or service related to them.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 22, 2008

60% of Marketing Budgets Remain Unchanged by Economy

So far, the majority of marketing budgets are not facing changes or cuts due to the economy, according to survey results released by eMetrics.

60% of respondents said their marketing budgets haven't changed.

After that, the news gets a little discouraging.

27.6% said their budgets are being affected negatively, while 6.9% answered very negatively.

Only 3.4% said their budgets were being affected positively and a miniscule 1.7% answered very positively.

Don't stay bummed for too long. The economy seems to finally getting senior management on board with those ever important analytics.

80.4% of marketers say interest in web analytics from senior management in the past 6 months has increased. On that note, it might be a good time to start pitching landing page testing as well.

So what advertising campaigns are specifically being affected? Check out this chart:

Some of the channels are being outsourced:

You can view the full report here (pdf).

What are your thoughts on the economy and marketing budgets? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 7, 2008

Internet Advertising Up 15.2% for the First Half of 2008

The Interactive Adverising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers have released internet advertising data for the first six months of 2008. The six month period saw $11.5 billion in revenues, up 15.2% over the same period in 2007.

The second quarter of 2008 was up 12.8% over Q2 of 2007, but showed a slight decline, 0.3%, from the first quarter.

Search revenues neared $5.1 billion, up 24% year-over-year. Display neared $3.8 billion, up 19%.

“Interactive advertising continues to demonstrate year over year growth as marketers and consumers increase their embrace of digital media,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. “The essentially flat performance we see quarter to quarter reflects in part cyclical advertising trends. Compared to the trajectory in other media and in the general economy, interactive has outperformed because it delivers a level of accountability unmatched by any other advertising medium.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

October 6, 2008

SEO, Site Search, and Email Marketing Ranked as Most Important to Online Retailers

E-tailers rate SEO, site search, and email marketing as the most important e-commerce technologies when it comes to promoting their businesses, according to new survey data released by SLI Systems.

91% of the retail companies surveyed cited site search as critical, very important or important to their online businesses.
Of the retailers that have measured the impact site search has had on their businesses, 87% reported positive results.
54% saw an increase in sales as a direct result of adding new site search capabilities, while 44% experienced greater conversion rates and 40% cited better customer satisfaction.
Of the retailers polled, close to 60% said they would be likely to consider a hosted (SaaS) site search solution over a traditional installed application to reduce costs, lessen the strain on IT resources and make for more rapid deployment.

SLI Systems' CEO Shaun Ryan shares why this data is important to understand in view of the upcoming holiday retail season: "Adopting proven technologies that can guide shoppers to a merchant's site in the bustling world of e-commerce will enable retailers to deliver a better customer experience and ensure the holidays are fruitful."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Simple Text Ads are Still Most Popular Online Ads

iPerceptions has released data showing which online advertising methods are most popular with consumers.

25% are likely to click on simple text ads
20% are likely to click on display ads follow
20% are likely to click on right banners
12% are likely to click on top banners

Video ads remain unpopular, with only 11% of consumers likely to click on them. But if you do use video ads, the audience segment most likely to click on them is the under 25 set, which account for 1/3 of the video ad watching audience

Jonathan Levitt, vice president of marketing at iPerceptions. “Our research shows that inexpensive banner and text ads are still preferred among web consumers. By having a direct dialog with consumers, we are able to know – with certainty – what consumers want and expect from their online experience.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 3, 2008

Olympics and Fantasy Football Drive Huge August 2008 for Online Sports

In August, Americans went online at work to get sports info 26% more year-over-year, thanks largely in part to the Olympics and Fantasy Football. Yahoo! Sports enjoyed a whopping 112% growth, putting them in the top spot for the month, according to Nielsen Online

Also of note, visits from women jumped 37% while traffic growth from men increased by 21%.

Here's the chart:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 29, 2008

93% of Americans Expect Companies to Have Social Media Presence

A new study is showing that 93% of Americans expect companies to have a presence in social media. 85% say companies should interact with consumers via social media, according to the data released by Cone, Inc.

Specifically, those surveyed believe:

Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
Companies should market to consumers (25%)

Men are twice as likely to interact with companies via social media than women. 33% will interact one or more times a week while only 17% of women will.

Two-thirds of households with 3 people or more and those making $75,000 or more feel a stronger connection to brands they interact with online.

What do you think about this survey? Does it change the way you think about social media as an advertising medium? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 21, 2008

57% of Ad and Marketing Executives are Okay With Web Surfing at Work

The idea that surfing the web at work is taboo might largely be a myth. 57% of executives say it's alright that their employees browse non-work related websites during the work day, according to a survey by The Creative Group. 41% say it's not okay and 2% aren't sure.

Just how long can you surf before turning that yes into a no? The mean average is 32 minutes.

The survey was conducted among advertising and marketing executives, traditionally a field with more creative types.

"In the creative field, surfing non-work sites may be considered part of the job because it allows professionals to keep up with trends and seek new sources of inspiration," said Megan Slabinski, executive director of The Creative Group. "Also, many employers recognize that making appointments and attending to personal tasks online might actually improve productivity, since professionals can quickly take care of needs while in the office instead of stepping out."

What do you think about web use at work? Is that a completely ridiculous question to ask a bunch of SEOs? And just what is up the butt of the 41% who say no? Tell us in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 22, 2008

80% Buy from a Store Whose Site They Previously Visited

Measurement and analytics are crucial to a successful online marketing campaign, but the relationship between online marketing and offline purchases has been a tricky one to figure out. But as more attention is given to the matter, we're learning more about the connection.

Media measurement company, Nielsen Online, conducted a survey to examine the relationship between online research and offline purchases. They found that 80% of participants who had recently bought consumer electronics from a brick and mortar store whose site they visited first.

53% bought from the site where they spent the most time.
58% would choose the internet if they could only use one channel to conduct product research on consumer electronics. Only 25% chose the brick and mortar store.

Nielsen used "pet food" as another category to examine the online/offline connection. They used this category to examine a niche that might not need as much research. I personally think this was a bad topic for that purpose due to last year's pet food crisis. But let's check out the data anyway.

Here's the percentages of pet food survey participants who would use the internet to research each topic.

48% Learn about nutritional specifications
45% Learn about product ingredients
45% Learn about recalls
40% Learn more about safety issues
40% Find sales/promotions

Of course, as we learned yesterday, more and more people are turning to the internet to make purchases due to rising gas costs.

But the message is clear, online marketing and company websites impact consumer purchasing decisions.

What do you think of the data? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 17, 2008

77.4% of Search Ads to Google in Q2 2008

Efficient Frontier has released search advertising market data for the second quarter of 2008, and it showed Google growing 2% over Q2 2007. For every new dollar spent on search ads in 2008 over 2007, Google received $1.10, while Yahoo lost $0.09 and Microsoft lost $0.01.

As a result, Google enjoyed 77.4% of total search engine spending in Q2 2008, while Yahoo fell 2% to 17.8% and Microsoft came in at 4.8%. Google's rise comes despite Adgooroo data suggesting their client base has actually declined.

Google accounted for 77.4 percent of total search engine spending in Q2 2008, an increase of 2 percentage points over the previous year.

Here's more toasty data nuggets for your consumption:

Cost per click (CPC) rates increased by 13.8 percent for Google in Q2 2008 versus a year ago, while average CPCs on Microsoft Live Search increased at a slower rate of 5.6 percent, and Yahoo! CPCs declined by 7.3 percent.
Return on Investment (ROI) improved on all three search engines, with Microsoft Live Search improving 25% YOY, while ROI on Yahoo! Search increased by 13%, and Google's ROI increased by 3%.
Automotive advertisers increased search advertising spending by 24 percent in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007, but retailers increased search spending by a cautious 1 percent. Financial services advertisers, hit hard by the mortgage crisis, decreased search engine spending by 7 percent YOY, and travel advertisers decreased spend by 17 percent as consumers pulled back on leisure spending.
The global outlook for Google's growth is very positive, with the search giant capturing 75% or more of search engine spending in Q2 2008 in the global markets in which Efficient Frontier operates, with the exception of Japan and China. In Q2 2008, for the first time Google captured a majority share of search engine spend in Japan, with 56% of search spending in that market.

Google releases Q2 revenues after the closing bell on Wall Street later today.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 10, 2008

Online Security Fears Larger than Actual Risk, Survey Finds

In the wake of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on online advertising and privacy, Mintel has released survey data revealing Americans are more concerned than they were 5 years ago about online security.

65% are more concerned than they were 5 years ago
28% are significantly more concerned than they were five years ago

But the actual risk is declining. The number of American identity thefts declined 12% from 2003 to 2006 (10.1 million to 8.9 million), according to US Justice Department data. Of the 8.9 million cases in 2006, only 8.3% of them were related to online activity, such as computer viruses, hackers or phishing. Mintel reports that less than 1% of emails they tracked were phishing scams.

“The actual risk of having your identity stolen online is not as high as many people think,” states Menke. “Financial services companies are trying to reassure consumers of this fact, but our research suggests their marketing messages aren't sticking. Companies need to find innovative new ways to convince Americans that their identities are secure online and when using email.”

Financial service companies already have a solid base to work from to achieve that goal. 71% of American adults report managing at least one financial services account online. The average American manages 3 financial services via email and the web.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 8, 2008

Online Couponing Up 56% During Weak Economy, High Energy Prices

Online couponing is up 56% from last year, likely due to high gas prices and a weak economy, according to Hitwise data reported by CouponCabin.com. The coupon company says it has experienced 35% growth over last summer.

"As consumers become more and more conscious of saving money, they're exploring new ways to cut costs without giving up too much of what they love, which includes shopping," said Scott Kluth, founder and president of CouponCabin.com.

CouponCabin also gave the following tips for online shopping:

Be Safe -- Only Shop at Secure Websites: Secure websites are definable by a yellow padlock in the status bar. By shopping at a secure website, it ensures hackers are unable to obtain any of the shopper's personal information.
Save On Shipping -- Search for Discounted or Free Shipping Coupons: Sites like CouponCabin.com have entire sections dedicated strictly to coupons for discounted or free shipping.
Let The Sales Find You: Register for e-newsletters to stay constantly informed of sales and discounts.
Stack For More Savings: Stacking is an online shopping trick that allows shoppers to use multiple coupons at once, providing extra savings. If there are two promotional code boxes, make sure to use two different coupon codes to maximize savings.
Shop For The Things You Want: Check listings for coupon codes that pertain to specific items you are interested in. Sites like CouponCabin.com have a link for "favorite deals," which allows shoppers to browse by category to view products with discount codes that may peak their interest.

Have you used online couponing? Share your experience in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yahoo Gains, Google Declines, and MSN Plummets for Q2 2008 Search Ads

AdGooroo has released second quarter search advertising results, and Google's client base is down 6.4% from the previous quarter. Google also declined 8.5% year-over-year.

Things were far worse for MSN. Their client base dropped a whopping 20% from Q1. The decline contributed to a 6.7% drop year-over-year. The decrease is not really a surprese since Microsoft has essentially admitted how bad their search is in their attempt to acquire Yahoo, and their successful acquisitions of FAST and Powerset.

Meanwhile, Yahoo could use some good news right now, and the AdGooroo data delivers. Yahoo saw a slight increase in its advertiser base at 0.03% over last quarter, and up 9.8% over last year.

Here's a chart with all the data goodness:

AdGooroo also reported data on the number of ads per keyword. Globally, the number of ads per keyword declined across Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When just looking at the U.S., however, Yahoo and Google held steady while Microsoft saw a decline.

More data for the math junkies:

What do you think of these numbers? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

June 26, 2008

1.8 Billion Internet Users by 2012, China to Overtake US Internet Use by 2011

By 2012, 1.8 billion people will be using the internet, according to JupiterResearch. That will be a 44% increase from 2007. China, India, Russia and Brazil will see the highest growth rates. China will overtake the U.S. in internet use by 2011.

"Even though the emerging economies will have lower online penetration rates compared to the developed countries, JupiterResearch believes that they will ramp up the learning curve in adopting sophisticated online activities compared to the developing countries," explained Vikram Sehgal, Research Director and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch.

Recent moves in the search industry seem to echo those projections. Yahoo's reorganization is mostly focused on a global strategy, likely building on their success in Asia. Last November, Yahoo added 9 countries to its mobile search, and recently expanded partnerships in the Asia/Pacific region. Yahoo has also invested heavily in India. They have a research lab in Bangalore and recently began testing "Glue Pages," a different way to view search results.

Meanwhile, Yandex, the leading Russian language search engine, has hired a Yahoo exec away to lead their San Fran-based operations.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft and Google have their eye on the big enchilada by staffing up in China, a market that is currently dominated by Baidu.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 16, 2008

Google Dominates Mobile Search Market Share in Q1 2008

Continuing its dominance in search, Google saw 61% of mobile searches in the first quarter of 2008, according to data released by Nielsen Mobile. Yahoo came in second at 18%, while MSN lagged behind at third with 5%.

65% of Google searchers were male while 63% of Yahoo searchers were male.

When it comes to what mobile searchers are looking for, Google and Yahoo users are alike:

Google searches: Information 33% Local listings 29% Websites/navigation 27% Yahoo searches: Information 33% Local listings 24% Websites/navigation 26%

But finding satisfactory results is still a bit of a challenge when it comes to mobile search. Only 44% of Google searchers and 40% of Yahoo searchers rated their experience in the 8-10 range on a scale of 10.

Last week, Google announced that it updated its mobile search offering to make it faster for searchers on the go.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 10, 2008

Social Networking the UK Continues to Rise

Social networking is a hot topic this year and the numbers continue to rise in the UK, according to new data released by eMarketer. In 2007, 11 million UK internet users visited social networking sites regularly. Also, in 2007, 27% said they had created a social network profile, but in 2008, already 60% of survey respondents said they had created a profile.

The ad spend for social networks in the UK is projected to rise a whopping 77% despite ongoing concerns over how to monetize social media. By 2012, social network ad spend is expected to have increased 148% over 2008, reaching £285 million ($533 million). This year, an estimated £115 million ($225 million) is expected to be spent on social network ads.

The UK is ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to social network spending, making up 68% of the market.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

YouTube Tops UK Social Media Sites for April 2008

Nielsen Online has released April 2008 social media rankings for the U.K. YouTube topped the list for the seventh straight month in a row.

Here's a look at the top 10:

And the top 10 from last year.

What do you think about YouTube's popularity? Are you leveraging online video in your social media campaigns? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 20, 2008

Nielsen Online Releases April 2008 U.S. Search Rankings

Nielsen Online has announced its April 2008 search share data for the U.S. Let's dive right into the numbers:

Google - 62% market share, up 35.4% year-over-year Yahoo - 17.5% market share, down 3.4% year-over-year MSN/Live Search - 9.7% market share, up 30% year-over-year AOL - 4.3% market share, down 5.1% year-over-year Ask - 2.1 % market share, up 35.8% year-over-year

Google saw an estimated 5.1 billion searches, while Yahoo saw 1.4 billion and MSN saw nearly 800 million.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 16, 2008

Google Leads UK Q1 2008 Search Engine Spending

Google leads in UK search engine spending for the first quarter of 2008, according to data released by Efficient Frontier. The search engine enjoyed 85% of the market. Click-Through Rates (CTR) actually saw a slight decline for Google over Q4 2007, but the ROI increased by 14%.

The same couldn't be said for Yahoo. Yahoo's search advertising market share was 11.9%, down 0.5% from Q4 2007. CTR declined 38% quarter-over-quarter and ROI declined 6%.

MSN increased their market share by 0.4% in Q1 to reach a 3.5% market share in the UK. While MSN's ROI dropped 10%, it was still 17% higher than Google's ROI.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

Wikipedia Traffic Grows 8,000% in 5 Years Due to Search Referrals

Nielsen Online has released data showing that Wikipedia's 8,000% growth in the past 5 years is attributed to search. Really? Is that what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1? I had no idea.

Breaking down the not-at-all suprising data:

Google sent the most search traffic to en.wikipedia.org with 61% of searches on home computers and 66% of work computers. Yahoo came in second at 19% home, 16% work. The main www.Wikipedia.org came in third, beating out MSN and AOL at home and search.MSN.com and search.Live.com at work.

Wikipedia's growth is slowing, however. Here's data for unique visitors in the month of April for the past six years with the year-over-year growth percentages:

2003 700,000, n/a 2004 2,082,000, 197% 2005 6,753,000, 224% 2006 25,970,000, 285% 2007 45,934,000 77% 2008 55,820,000 17%

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 14, 2008

Student Searches: The Top 15 Searches for the K-12 Set

What are your kids searching for during the school day? netTrekker d.i. has released data about the Top 15 In-School searches for the first quarter of 2008. And here they are:

1. Games 2. Dogs 3. Animals 4. Civil War 5. George Washington 6. Holocaust 7. Abraham Lincoln 8. Multiplication 9. Math Games 10. Weather 11. Frogs 12. Fractions 13. Planets 14. Sharks 15. Plants

The results were tracked by Thinkronize, the developers behind netTrekker d.i., which is a safe educational search engine.

"Search engines like Google(TM) and Yahoo® pull together lists of the most popular keyword queries, underscoring our nation's interests and fixations and showcasing trends and patterns," said Thinkronize CEO Randy Wilhelm. "Our report offers a different view -- a real-time school-based mirror of what our children are searching for -- both for academic purposes and out of genuine curiosity."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

Paid Search Click Data: Syndicated Versus Pure Search Referrals

Efficient Frontier has released data showing where those paid search click referrals are coming from. Here's the raw data:

Yahoo: 45% from pure search, the rest from its 1196 syndicated sites Google: 59% from pure search, the rest from its 431 syndicated sites MSN: 99% from pure search, the rest from its 5 syndicated sites

But when it comes to conversions, pure search beat out syndicated sites every time:

Yahoo: 58% from pure search Google: 75% from pure search MSN: 100% from pure search

Does this data line up with what you're seeing in your niche or industry? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 22, 2008

Nielsen Releases March 2008 U.S. Search Data

We've already seen the numbers from Hitwise, Compete, and comScore. Now it's Nielsen's turn to serve up its March 2008 data for top U.S. search providers.

Google, of course, took the top spot with 58.7%, up 25.5% year-over-year. Yahoo came in second at 18.1%, a decline of 4.5% year-over-year. MSN rolled into third with 12%, a 36.6% increase while AOL experienced a decrease of 19.4% to get just 4.1% of the market. Ask.com came in at just 2.4% but that's a 52.4% increase from last year.

Here's the big breakdown/comparison for each of the top 5:

Google

Hitwise 67.25% Compete 69.4% comScore - 59.2% Nielsen – 58.7%

Yahoo

Hitwise - 20.29% Compete – 14.8% comScore – 21.3% Nielsen – 18.1% MSN

Hitwise – 6.65% Compete – 10.2% comScore – 9.4% Nielsen – 12% AOL

Hitwise – N/A Compete – 1.5% comScore – 4.8% Nielsen – 4.1%

Ask

Hitwise – 4.09% Compete – 3.7% comScore – 4.7% Nielsen – 2.4%

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:08 AM | Permalink

October 26, 2007

The Impact of the Omniture - Visual Sciences Merger

Omniture, Inc. (Nasdaq: OMTR) announced yesterday that they are acquiring Visual Sciences (Nasdaq: VSCN) for a total of $394 million. Visual Sciences consists of two recently merged entities, the original Visual Sciences, and WebSideStory, the company that produced the HBX family of analytics tools.

This move follows closely on the heels of Omniture's acquisition of Offermatica, a leading web optimization company. Clearly, Omniture is moving to consolidate their position as the leading brand in this space. Visual Sciences was one of it's larger competitors. Their is a distinct synergy in the nature of the customer base, as both companies focus on large enterprise customers and high value optimization.

It will be intriguing to see how they go about integrating the product lines and the product development teams. There are many products that overlap in functionality and structure. This will be one of the more challenging parts of the acquisition for them.

Overall, I would expect this type of activity to continue, and not just from Omniture. There are too many players in the space. I will be intrigued to see who steps up in the SMB analytics space. There is plenty of room for consolidation at that level too, and companies like Omnniture and Visual Sciences are not really designed to optimally serve that market.

For search marketers, the consolidation is a good thing. We need to have a few financially stable companies to choose from, not 20. For SEO firms that server multiple clients, having to deal with a smaller set of different analytics tools will make life easier.

Posted by at 9:50 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2007

Hey! Nielsen Wants You

After all these years, Nielsen has decided to compete (a little) with those it measures online. HeyNielsen.com invites everybody to share their opinions about entertainment directly. The operating premise is that YOU can influence online and offline media through this new social site.

Nielsen has created a new Hey! Nielsen score which reflects visitor opinions. The score is also based on news and raw data from The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and BlogPulse -- all properties owned by Nielsen. We'd like to learn more about how this stew is mixed together.

The site looks like it's been carefully constructed, yet the site search isn't up to par. When I looked for "Brad Pitt,” he showed up below a few dozen non-Brads from the music arena. If I'm going to be encouraged to contribute my opinions, then search should be put on the fix-it list.

As announced yesterday, Nielsen has rolled out an A-Z social site here. So I checked out Brad's page, his scores, other opinions, and even external blog postings. I also noticed ways to connect to other members, and learn about their interests. While all these and other features seem nice, it's hard to predict whether Hey! Nielsen will become a social hub.

In the meantime, Nielsen succeeds when it pulls me in, gets my opinions, and makes me available for research. It's not a bad bargain, if visitors get a little something in return.

Posted by at 2:21 AM | Permalink

July 30, 2007

Alexa Toolbar Accuracy and Uses

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped posted yesterday about how the accuracy of Alexa data is really poor. The specifics of his post are really a spoof as all the "data" is made up. Philipp is in fact spoofing the Alexa methodology itself as he indicated that the data: "uses gut feeling from a selected sample group (me) as data source". Alexa's accuracy problems are well known.

The underlying problem is that the Alexa data is derived from users who use the Alexa toolbar. At the end of the day, the audience is just not large enough, and the dependency on a willingness to install the toolbar introduces a natural bias into the date. My own experience suggests that these problem become worse and worse as you deal with lower and lower traffic level sites. Have a site that gets 20,000 visitors per day? You are not really on the map with Alexa at that level.

However, I still use Alexa as a tool. It was a blog post by Avinash Kaushik that taught me how to still use it as an effective tool. Quite simply, use the Alexa feature that shows comparative traffic levels to compare your site's traffic to that of your competitors.

Because your competitors are in the same business as you are, the bias problem no longer is a factor to worry about (because the bias will affect all the compares sites equally). For most businesses this will provide a quick way to compare the relative web site traffic levels in their industry. So the accuracy problems are real, but there is still a way to use the tool to extract useful information.

Posted by at 1:32 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2007

New Report from WebAnalyticsDemystified

WebAnalyticsDemystified has released an important new report titled: The Problem with Free Web Analytics. The report included a number of interesting results, including:

35% of free analytics users reort only an ad=hoc use of the tool, as opposed to less than 20% who used a paid for solution.
42% of companies using a free solution have no human resources dedicated to analytics, as compared with only 18% of companies with a paid for solution.
64% of people ussing a free solution have less than 2 years experience, as compared with 32% of those using paid solutions.

For those of you who are less familiar with web analytics, the premise here is that getting a high ROI on the use of web analytics involves an investment of people time. These powerful tools really begin to deliver when you use them to uncover the way that users are interacting with your site, and dig into a lot of details. For better, or for worse, this is an inherently custom process, because the needs of every site are different. Ultimately, according to Eric Peterson, CEO of WebAnalyticsDemystified successful "web analytics is hard".

Eric also emphasized that he also encountered users of free analytics that were making the people investment, and that it was possible to be just as successful with free analytics as paid, but that "it comes down to commitment". It should be noted that Eric uses Google Analytics on the WebAnalyticsDemystified web site.

Ultimately, these results make sense to me. For people who are just beginning to dabble in analytics, and are not really sure how to get the most out of it at this point in time, picking a free solution makes sense. Once a company has committed to investing cash in a solution, they are clearly more likely to have a different mindset about what they are doing. But the study makes for interesting reading, and provides insight into the state of the analytics market.

The results in the study were based on a survey of 856 web analytics users and consultants conducted in March of 2007.

Posted by at 9:02 AM | Permalink

July 2, 2007

Old But Not Forgotten?

With all the focus on Gen Y and even the millennials, seniors aged 65+ seem almost completely forgotten when it comes to online marketing. We can't help but wonder why, except we admit this isn't exactly the most desired demographic for advertisers.

Still elders are considered to be one of the fastest growing demographics for online media. It's not so much that people in their 70s and 80s are suddenly shifting to being heavy internet users; it's that a huge wave of Internet-savvy boomers, now in their 60s, will begin passing the 65+ milestone – making now the time to start planning.

Technology Adoption: We can see the transition happening already. Our elders represented over 12% of the population in 2000, and the U.S. Census projects steady increases to nearly 21% of total Americans by 2050. According to Pew research, only 15% of boomers aged 50-65 are unwired as compared to 44% of the current elders. That compounds the changes expected from this group.

At the other end of the scale, more super-wired behaviors will emerge soon. There are admittedly a few seniors who download music and make blog postings today. Pew reports that about four percent fall into this “Elite” category (early adaptors, positive view on technology, own most gadgets.) However the older boomers are already six times more likely to fall into this category.

Online Activity: There are areas where the seniors behave like everybody else. They are just as likely to look for health information as Gen Y users. They make online travel reservations in equal numbers. Both e-mailing and searching, especially for people, are commonplace activities too. They don't research products or buy online as much as their counterparts, at least not yet.

When starting an online search, elders are reacting to off-line media triggers based on their consumption patterns. Per BIGresearch, they rely most heavily on newspapers before searching. Nearly 53% identify newspapers versus 42% of all adults, and specifically mention reading "an article" too. They cite radio less frequently, at 18% versus 30%, perhaps due to no commuting time.

Of course, elders initiate searches based on online marketing influences. They respond to e-mail advertising like other adults, both over 25% each. Yet only 17% point to online advertising versus 25% overall, and we're not sure why. They aren't reacting much to blogs, instant messaging or online communities, but only young adults are really triggered there.

Destinations: Certainly some web sites cater only to seniors, offering everything from health care advice to computer know-how, even the opportunity to start your own blog. Notable examples include AARP, which has many different resources including an active forums area; Senior Journal, which guides visitors to local services; and Senior.com, a site whose tagline refers to it as “Your Internet Community.” There are also destinations aimed for older boomers. One well-known example is ThirdAge Media. We all chuckled about a specialized search engine, Cranky.com, announced earlier this year. Cranky is part of Eons, which aims to be community-destination for this age group.

What's more interesting? The actual behaviors of seniors online. Creating specialized, age-based sites to meet their needs seems very challenging to me. However, knowing exactly what they are doing online – and where to market effectively to them – should be more productive in the long run.

Posted by at 10:24 PM | Permalink

June 7, 2007

What Are They Selling?

Let's take a quick look at the largest online retailers. In a "normal" ad environment, their fortunes would impact ad rates and inventory directly. We're not in that marketplace here, yet it's still important to share performance stats about these big spenders.

Internet Retailer just produced their 2006 sales tallies. Nearly $84 billion came from the Top 500 retailers alone, reflecting over 21% growth versus last year. They reported under $19 billion from smaller retailers, and another $34 billion from eBay.

Among the largest retailers, product categories tell more interesting stories.

* Volume changers: Apparel & Accessories jumped from 10.2% to 11.9% of total sales. Computers & Electronics decreased from 25.6% to 23.6% of total sales.

* More competitors: Some 12.4% of the top retailers offer Housewares & Furnishings, and only contribute 3.9% of total sales. Likewise, Non-Apparel suppliers represent 13.6% of top retailers and 3.7% of total sales.

* Smaller contributors: Categories which sell the least include Flowers & Gifts (1.5%); Hardware (1.4%); Jewelry (0.9%); Sporting Goods (1.5%), and Toys & Hobbies (1.2%).

* Larger contributors: Categories which sell the most include Computers & Electronics (23.6%); Mass Merchandisers & Department Stores (26.8%); and Office Supplies (14.7%).

What does this all mean? Deep-pocketed suppliers impact the ad market. The sheer number of direct competitors matters. However online players know that products, brands, prices and seasonality all impact the outlook as well. We could use a few strong economists to guide the way.

June 10 Update: eMarketer announced its E-Commerce Study which projects annual growth dropping from 24.7% in recent years, down to 17.5% annually through 2011. The growth in online buyers also decreases from 11.8% to 3.5%. These projections mean that retailers can't just rely on marketplace expansion -- and will need to advertise more aggressively.

Posted by at 4:10 PM | Permalink

March 21, 2007

Page Rank Obsession

We all want to measure the progress of our site(s) in as many ways as we can. This is why people obsess about things like Google Page Rank, Alexa rankings, and other things that really don't matter very much. And who can blame us? While these measurements are highly flawed, they are among the only external methods of measurement that we have available.

We have more extremist people who carefully watch the behavior of different data centers. This is a prevalent enough activity that Matt Cutts did a video about it. This particular practice does not seem to add any value at all from my perspective.

In addition, as we head into the future of personalized search, what people obsess about is going to need to change. The focus will shift to looking closely at stats that measure user interaction with their sites. Things like "bounce rate" and "page views per visit" will become increasingly important.

Frankly, these things are critical already (because they speak to conversion rates), but now they are likely to become a factor in your search engine rankings. It will be our new obsession as we enter into 2008. Of course, if you want to position for yourself for success now, start thinking about your users first, before worrying about the search engine. It just might get you a leg up on your competition.

Posted by at 2:07 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2007

Get Some Video Ad Accountability

The biggest players are still scratching their heads about how to define and quantify accountability, based on what we heard at ClickZ's Online Video Ad confab on Monday.

* Google: Raja Moonka says you need to conduct surveys that measure purchase intent and brand favorability. * Yahoo: Theresa LaMontagne recommends using scanner panels, to note the lift from sales.

To me, it seems like accountability should not be solely based on these after-the-fact measures, which incorporate all media placements used in branding campaigns.

Instead, let's start by measuring something about online video ads and their current consumption patterns. This isn't impossible to do.

Most video advertisers target specific demos or interests and make buys on specific domains. Thus they should gauge interest levels based on delivered impressions, streams and streamers.

We know that NetRatings and comScore are imperfect, but they invest in tremendous online panels and report metrics from them. These web analytics companies can provide ongoing, trended results for the largest video advertisers and domains.

As Ad Server companies start providing inventory, they can offer another perspective and reliably report what video ads have been trafficked and delivered across domains.

For this new video ad marketplace to gain traction, these suppliers should create metrics that work for large and small advertisers alike. There should be some standards out there, to drive accountability across these buys.

Posted by at 10:52 PM | Permalink

March 5, 2007

Googler Criticizes Alexa Data

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has published some stats showing what many online marketers have been saying for years -- Alexa data is skewed by the fact that more online marketers download the Alexa toolbar.

Alexa has come under fire repeatedly in recent years, from marketers and competitors.

Norvig's limited test with five tech sites shows that Alexa creates as much as a 50:1 selection bias for certain sites, such as that of Matt Cutts, who discusses the stats on his blog. Because more search marketers tend to download Alexa's toolbar, Cutts has an Alexa pageview ranking that's about 25 times that of Norvig, though actual server stats show that Norvig's site gets nearly twice the pageviews.

"What that means is that people with the Alexa toolbar installed are 25 times more likely to view a page on Matt's site versus mine, but overall, all users view twice as many pages on my site," he writes.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:19 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2006

Page Views -- Losing Its Front-Runner Status

When discussing site traffic, you always hear about Unique Visitors or Page Views. Although actual numbers are endlessly debated, these metrics are treated as the lingua franca among publishers and advertisers. Yet even these stalwarts change, and page views will lose its front-runner status during 2007. It's about time.

Even comScore says page views are not enough. They are planning to incorporate the missing consumption of dynamic content. In last week's press release, CEO Magid Abraham announced "enhanced metrics of user engagement and advertising exposure" next year. He explained the need to reflect "new technologies such as AJAX - which enable real-time site updates without needing to refresh a page."

What will replace or enhance page views? No word yet. There's an opportunity to get this right, not only calculations but also industry-wide acceptance. Micro Persuasion believes that suppliers should start thinking small, as marketers focus on the "influence circles within the niches that matter to them." Yet the big ad buyers will not evaporate, and also require ongoing support.

Some "pages-plus" metric is overdue, one that captures unique content and ad views. It needs to be something that's projected and tracked by everyone. Its biases must be explained and at least partially understood. Finally, it should become the new denominator for calculating effective RPMs, which means it will have to be lingua franca again.

A lot is riding on this metric, and I look forward to the debate.

Posted by at 12:44 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Blogger declares page view stats are dead

Steve Rubel, a senior VP in Edelman's Me2Revolution practice as well as the author of the popular Micro Persuasion blog, also writes a column for Advertising Age. In his latest column, The Dying Page-View Metric, he says page view stats have served us well, but it's time to put these metrics to rest.

According to Steve, "the trusty page view is on life support, and I give it four years to live."

Now, he's a PR guy, so many in the advertising business will dismiss his prediction as heresy. But, he makes an interesting case, nevertheless.

According to Steve, page view stats don't offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of websites built with Ajax and other interactive technologies that allow users to conduct activity all within a single web page. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. "The movement to chunk the web down into widgets will only accelerate this," he adds.

Whether you agree with him or not, read his column. The battle over marketing metrics like page view stats promises to be a hell of a show.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:27 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Search Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced

Catch up time on search engine popularity stats. comScore and NetRatings put out October 2006 figures this week, plus Hitwise released those earlier this month. Google's still tops, Yahoo still strong, Microsoft is still dropping and Ask surpasses AOL's search share, according to comScore. Below, the trend from all of them over the past year, plus my long-promised compare-and-contrast charts.

First, let's do a compare-and-contrast table with the basic figures from each service. These show the estimated share of the number of searches that happened in the United States in October 2006.

Month

comScore

NetRatings

Hitwise

Google

45.4%

49.6%

60.9%

Yahoo

28.2%

23.9%

22.3%

Microsoft

11.7%

8.8%

10.6%

Ask

5.8%

2.8%

4.3%

AOL

5.4%

6.2%

0.5%

Others

3.5%

8.7%

1.2%

Across the board, all the services put Google in the lead, Yahoo second and Microsoft's Windows Live third (sorry, I still say MSN on the chart). Two of the services put Ask over AOL in the fourth place spot. More analysis on all this in the service trend charts, below.

Here's comScore figures over the past year:

Remember that Google drop back in July, when lots of people started freaking out about the demise of the Big G. I warned not to focus on month-to-month changes. Since then, Google's recovered according to comScore and keeps going.

Yahoo's seen declines since July, but not enough to send up the alarm bells. They are well within the usual ranges that I've discussed are the things to watch. That range is the 25 to 30 percent slice of the chart.

In contrast, Microsoft continues on its long, steady drop in popularity. It will especially be interesting to see the figures in the next few months, as IE7 rolls out and potentially gives Microsoft Live Search a bump. Or not. My Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine article talks more about the changes in IE7 that might help drive traffic.

Unnoticed, as far as I can tell, is the fact that in September, Ask overtook AOL for the fourth slot in the search engine share battle. That's a big deal. In fact, according to comScore, AOL is on track to plunge out of the 5 to 10 percent band it has occupied over the past year. Ask is hanging in there.

Of course, the traffic for Ask isn't just for Ask.com. It's for the combination of sites that Ask owns or controls, including places like Excite, iWon, MyWay.com and My Web Search. Still, as a network, Ask remains controlling a significant chunk of the search space.

That's what comScore says. Now let's see how it looks at NetRatings:

Basically, NetRatings shows status quo. Google and Yahoo keep ticking along at the same levels. So does Ask. AOL hangs in roughly the same general range. It's Microsoft Windows Live (MSN on the chart) that catches my eye most with consistent decline.

Also note that with NetRatings, AOL is well above Ask. That's because NetRatings is only reporting the share for Ask.com. If other Ask-owned properties were combined, then the Ask figure would be higher. Much of that traffic instead flows into the "Other" line.

Next to Hitwise:

Hitwise doesn't go back as far as NetRatings and comScore, so it's harder to feel confident about trends. But the trends are similar to comScore, a slight Google rise, Yahoo holding steady, Ask above AOL and that decline of MSN.

Now back to what I promised ages ago, the old-style comparison charts I used to do. Here are all three services together, showing share score for October 2006:

Now let me explain what I think is unique in charting the figures this way. Usually, you'd see a comparison using a bar chart. Shares for Google from all three services would be shown as three bars next to each other, then the same for Yahoo and so on.

I like doing these as line charts, because it makes the gaps more noticeable and gives you a trend as well.

For example, you can see how all the services rate Google tops, though the amount Google is above the others may vary. Conclusion? While Google's exact popularity is uncertain, it's clearly more popular than anyone else, the services agree.

Notice that with Yahoo, they all agree it is in second place and the general range of popularity is closer (roughly between 25 to 30 percent). For MSN (Windows Live), the all come together. When you hit AOL, Hitwise is the big player that's way off the mark from the other two. I've covered this before, that I don't think Hitwise is getting accurate information about AOL that causes this. But seeing the two big skews -- that Hitwise puts Google so high above the others and AOL so low -- makes me think that if AOL was counted correctly, then Hitwise would be reflecting the same general trend as the others.

Now let's trend each of the major search engines using figures from all three services. Here's Google:

Fair to say, Google's pretty much continuing to grow, despite the hiccups you might see from time-to-time on various services.

Here's Yahoo:

Generally, I think it's fair to say that Yahoo had a spike in popularity earlier this year but has settled down more to its usual levels. That's not bad. It has healthy, long-term traffic. What remains to be seen is if it can grow that traffic more in the long term.

Here's Microsoft:

Slice it how you want, no one is reporting a pretty picture for Microsoft. Unlike Yahoo, they haven't held share. It's drop, drop, drop.

Here's AOL, which similar to Microsoft, shows drops:

I'm sorry I don't have the similar chart for Ask. I'll try to add it later, but I shut my spreadsheet (argh) before saving my comparison numbers, so I have some more copy and pasting to do to get that chart back.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:19 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2006

Google Beats Microsoft, Yahoo As College Grad Choice

Online Recruitment reports on a CollegeGrad.com poll showing Google is the most desired place for technology students to work for. The poll asked 1,600 respondents in October "Who would you rather work for?" The results:

Google - 49%
Microsoft - 29%
Yahoo - 12%
IBM - 10%

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:30 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

100 Million Sites = Search Wins

CNN reports that the Internet has now crossed a significant milestone; there are 100 million operating websites. The Web's growth has been accelerating: "There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100 million, late in the month of October 2006."

This is kind of like human population growth. The bottom line here is that the more unwieldy the Internet becomes, the more central search becomes as the main navigational tool. And that means -- ka-ching -- paid search will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:24 PM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

SnapShot: A Better Version Of Alexa

Compete, Inc. is a B2B firm that conducts consumer-oriented research for large clients. Now the company has released SnapShot, a free tool that anyone can use. It operates like Alexa or Google Trends to display relative traffic, as well as several other metrics such as page views and time on site. Here's an example.

According to Compete, there's a qualitative and quantitative difference between this tool and Google Trends or Alexa, because it leverages their entire 2 million person panel. See Compete's Alexa comparison.

There are a few limitations: it's U.S. audience only, sites with fewer than 10,000 monthly uniques are excluded and you can only compare three sites side by side. But out of the gate it's a much better and more accurate tool than Alexa.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:14 PM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Search Influenced $15.2 Billion In Consumer Electronics Spending Through First Half

As the latest in an ongoing series of studies that capture the evolving and complex nature of consumer behavior today, Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded in June of this year and surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults who were pre-qualified as intending to make consumer electronics (CE) purchases.

The study looked at five CE categories: cell phones, computers, digital cameras, MP3 players and televisions. Below are the top-level findings:

The amount of online research was tied directly to the price of the product. Because higher priced products are more "considered" purchases, people spent more time doing online research. The range of time was nine hours for cell phones at the low end and 15 hours for TVs at the high end. The average duration of online research prior to purchase was 12 hours.
Of all purchasers of CE products in the study, online buyers were a significant minority (29%), while most purchases happened in local stores (71%). Of those buying offline, almost three quarters conducted online research prior to purchase.
Search engines in particular were used by 45% of the survey population that ultimately purchased in a local retail store.
On average CE consumers in the study used visited six manufacturer and/or retail sites before purchase. In navigating to those sites 55% used a search engine to go to the site, while 46% directly entered a URL. Approximately 10% followed a link from another site.
In terms of the range of sources used by purchasers (both online and off), the top four in order were as follows: 1) Internet 2) print 3) word of mouth 4) retail/other.
In terms of recall, CE consumers remembered seeing ads in various media in the following order: 1) print ads in magazines or newspapers 2) TV ads 3) Internet display ads 4) email 5) radio and 6) billboards. For Internet display advertising 40% indicated they recalled seeing an ad for the product.
One of the conclusions of the study was that of the $32.5 billion spent on the five consumer electronics categories in the first six months of the year, online research influenced $25.1 billion of that spending. Among the online sources, the study also concluded that search had a direct or indirect influence on $15.2 billion of CE buying.

Finally, the study examined the differences between “searchers” and “non-searchers,” "based on self-reported search engine usage during their research and purchase process." This is what the research determined:

"Searchers, defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed. They are more educated about what they buy, increasingly likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are often considered a resource of information by friends and family. They consider more brands and are 114 percent more likely to consider Internet display advertising in their research process."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 3:52 PM | Permalink

October 19, 2006

Click Fraud Dropping Amongst Google & Yahoo

News.com reports on a new Click Fraud Index study that shows the click fraud rate dropping from 12.8 percent to 11.9 percent in the 3rd quarter amongst top-tier PPC engines. Second-tier engines have realized an increase in click fraud with 23.2 percent from 20.3 percent. Overall, click fraud is down at 13.8 percent from 14.1 percent, quarter to quarter.

Postscript: Google asked me if they can make a statement about this, so here it is:

The estimates of attempted click fraud provided by this report are considerably more than the numbers we see on our network. More importantly, even if the numbers in the report could be believed despite the serious flaws we have previously demonstrated in their methodology, advertisers should understand that they include clicks Google has filtered and not charged for. As a result, the statitistics in the report do not actually measure the impact of click fraud on advertisers but the amount of fraud that may have been attempted. Google advertisers can see exactly the amount clicks we filter by running a simple report in AdWords

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink

October 18, 2006

Google To Own 25% Of 2006 Online Ad Revenue

An eMarketer.com report estimates that Google will account for twenty-five percent of all online ad revenue. Google's share continues to increase (65% increase YoY) while Yahoo's growth continues to decrease, eMarketer says. Google first surpassed Yahoo in ad revenue back in 2005, but barely. Google in 2006 is expected to earn over $4 billion in ad revenue but Yahoo has just $2.9 billion according to eMarketer.com.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

Why Don't External Site Popularity Estimates Add Up?

A twofer today on whether you can trust the web metrics that are reported out there, one an article from BusinessWeek while the other is a big study from SEOmoz based on data gathered from a variety of search blogs. More details below, with lots of comments from me along the way.

Web Numbers: What's Real? from BusinessWeek looks at how sites want to prove they're popular but their own internal metrics might not stand-up to external ones -- nor do external services themselves agree.

I love the irony here. I wrote about how in August, BusinessWeek itself declared Digg to be the 24th most popular site in the US based on Alexa data that many marketers are highly suspicious of. Now I've got BusinessWeek telling me:

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web.

Pity that secret wasn't outed before a BusinessWeek cover story leveraging on of those stats so highly. In fact, BusinessWeek now writes:

Web outfits seem to agree that Alexa is flawed, but they continue to rely on it because the data are so addictive. Since Alexa's numbers are free and available online, they can easily be plugged into a PowerPoint presentation or onto a blog, providing a quick-and-dirty way to get a competitive snapshot. Blogs cite Alexa as gospel, and its graphs are part of nearly every startup's pitch to investors.

Apparently, the stats were just gospel for bloggers. BusinessWeek took it as gospel itself.

Meanwhile, the story leaves me cold when it says:

No wonder that a host of newer services, such as Alexa and Hitwise, are highlighting the weaknesses of the older traffic-measuring companies and are muscling onto the scene with alternatives.

Yes, Alexa's only been offering site traffic estimates since at least 1999, so let's call it a newer service. Sorry for the rant, BusinessWeek, but you're not redeeming yourself well with this.

Still, it's a nice update to what's actually an old, old problem, that internal metrics might not agree with external estimates. The search engines long ago would yap that comScore or NetRatings said they weren't as popular as internally they believed. Naturally, they stay quiet if those figures perhaps are off in their favor. My past series on stats look at this more:

Another good point in the article is how it highlights that things like AJAX and widgets might not get counted in traffic figures. Counting popularity on the web has never been easy, and it's just getting more complicated.

Meanwhile, over at SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin's finished a project where he's assembled internal metrics from various search-related blogs and compares them to some external metrics. Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics is well worth checking out, if only to see how different sites stack up against each other, based on self-reported figures.

Unfortunately, the big visitor table isn't sorted by any particular order. It's mainly showing sites with the most visits in 2006, but there are a few glitches that throw it off. Still, lots of stats to love there.

There's another table that lists metrics from Alexa, Compete, Technorati and other sources for each of the sites. This is even harder to digest. The table seems sorted in order of who was popular based on the internal metrics. It would have been better to sort it by one of the external metrics (say Alexa) and then let you see the rank order compared to the internal metrics.

Lots of slack to Rand, however -- he had his hands full just getting this assembled and still needs time to get his Digg submission crew going to gain some page views for it. Look, Rand's blog gets most of its traffic from Digg -- he's a master. Yep, but hey Rand -- who has the highest percentage of traffic from search engines? That would be my Daggle blog -- eat my dust, Rand! Then again, that might also suggest an lack of other online marketing activities for Daggle -- and that would be right. It's just my play area :)

Back to the internal versus external comparison. With the tables hard to digest, I went straight to the summary:

From our estimates, the top 5 best predictors of traffic, in order, are:

Technorati Rank
Yahoo! Link Count
Technorati Link Count
SEOmoz's Page Strength Score
Alexa Rank

However, none of these are nearly accurate enough to use, even in combination, to help predict a site's level of traffic or its relative popularity, even in a small niche with similar competitors. Unfortunately, it appears that the external metrics available for competitive intelligence on the web today simply do not provide a significant source of value....

Incidentally, I did log in to Hitwise to check their estimations and although I can't publish them (as Hitwise is a paid service and doing so would violate terms of service), I can say that the numbers issued from the competitive intelligence tool were no better than Alexa's in predicting relative popularity or traffic estimation.

The sad conclusion is that right now, no publicly available competitive analysis tool we're aware of provides solid value. Let's hope the next few years provide better data. Please leave comments, questions or feedback in this blog post on the topic.

Go get your Digg traffic for this, Rand -- it's well deserved.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:16 AM | Permalink

October 13, 2006

Consumer Satisfaction Doesn't Equal Market Share

Earlier this week J.D. Power and Associates released the findings of its "2006 Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study." The study, based on a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. residential Internet users, found that Yahoo Messenger ranked the highest among IM clients and that – and this is something of a surprise – InfoSpace's Dogpile had the highest rankings among search engines.

Here are the rankings of IM clients in terms of customer satisfaction:

1. Yahoo! Messenger 2. MSN Messenger 3. Windows Messenger 4. Instant Message Average 5. Google Talk 6. Trillian 7. AIM/AOL Instant Messenger

Compare that to U.S. IM market share (per Nielsen//Netratings):

1. AOL 2. MSN 3. Yahoo 4. Google

The J.D. Power report also said that U.S. residential IM usage was flat vs. 2005, at 36%. Yet the survey found that "among customers who report using IM on a regular or occasional basis, nearly 70 percent report that to some degree, instant messaging has replaced the use of traditional telephones." There are implications here for traditional telephony that are striking and worth further exploration.

Probably more interesting to readers of this blog are the search-engine findings. The survey reported that 75% of residential Internet subscribers used multiple search engines.

Here's the market-share breakdown that J.D. Power found:

1. Google: 51% (up 8 points from 2005) 2. Yahoo: 17% (down 4 points) 3. AOL: 9% (down 1 point)

The release doesn't report on the respective shares of Ask or MSN/Windows Live. Presumably they constitute the remaining 23% of usage or something approaching that.

Compare comScore August search market share data:

1. Google Sites: 44% 2. Yahoo: 28.7% 3. MSN: 12.5% 4. AOL: 5.6% 5. Ask: 5.5%

Here are the J.D. Power survey's customer satisfaction findings. Little used Dogpile was ranked number one:

1. Dogpile 2. Ask.com 3. Google 4. Yahoo! Search 5. AOL Search 6. MSN Search 7. Internet Explorer (treated as a search engine in the survey)

I don't have any insight into the survey methodology so we have to take the results at face value. But 10,000+ respondents is a very large sample. A disconnect is the difference between search engine market share and the satisfaction ratings. Based on these findings one would think that if Ask and (especially) Dogpile could gain broader awareness and visibility they might be able to gain some share.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:19 AM | Permalink

October 12, 2006

Resources For Finding Statistics For Any Web Site

Rand over at SEOMoz wrote an excellent post detailing all the different resources publicly available to gather statistical data on pretty much any web site out there. He breaks down the tools into several parts including "Technical Data," "Ownership/Hosting Data," "Statistics/Popularity Data," "Search Engine Indexing Data," "Link Data," "Social Tagging Data," "Third-Party Trust Metrics," "Important Directory & Site Listings," and "Press & Media Mentions." This comprehensive list of resources is bookmark-worthy and I seriously hope Rand keeps this particular post up-to-date.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:26 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

MySpace: Not Just For The Under 30 Crowd

As a kind of twist on that old 60's mantra, social networking's slogan might have been: not for anyone over 30 -- or so we thought. As is being widely covered, comScore reported and MySpace apparently confirmed that the average age of its users is going up. More than 50% of its users in August were over 35. This represents a kind of mainstreaming of social networking in one way of looking at it. MySpace, as you remember, has a deal with Google in which the latter will pay a guaranteed $900 million over a three-year period to be the search and paid search provider on the site.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:42 AM | Permalink

October 5, 2006

Search Competition; Why Can't Others Catch Up To Google?

BusinessWeek.com has a good article on search competition, explaining how Google's continued growth amongst all the competition is practically unaffected. In short, the article goes over new features, refinements, and user interfaces and explains that it is mostly about the trust the searchers have for the Google brand to provide the best results. Take a look at Danny's recent rant, he goes into this more and also check out Danny's post on Daggle.com named Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think. Want a view from a Google employee on the article, read Matt Cutts take on it, where he kinda of knocks Ask.com's topic communities link analysis method, saying it is "hard to explain" to people.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:20 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2006

Organic & Paid Search Conversion Metrics Similar

ClickZ reports on a WebSideStory study that shows that organic search traffic realized a conversion rate of 3.13 percent while paid search traffic realized a conversion rate of 3.4 percent. The study covered 57 million search engine visits from "20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006." ClickZ notes that organic search traffic does tend to have a higher click rate (1.5 times higher than paid search volume).

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:23 PM | Permalink

September 13, 2006

Hitwise Data Center Offers Search Terms & Top Search Engines For Various Countries

New from Hitwise is the Hitwise Data Center, sharing details on web surfing behavior. There are different data centers for various countries, and for search marketers, two key reports tell you top terms and top search engines.

Hitwise Data Center US, for example, shows you the top search engines by volume of searches here and top search terms here. From the Data Center home page, you can also use the drop-down box to get top terms by particular categories, such as these for dating.

Beyond the US, there's also:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:49 PM | Permalink

Site Search Volume More Than Web Search Volume

There were two interesting articles on site search, searches done directly on a web site versus a web search engine, recently. The first was from Shaun Ryan where he estimated the search volume of site search compared to web search. He shows that web searches are performed about 200 million times per day. But based on his best guesstimation, there are more than 2 billion site search done per day. If that is the case, a new study from Lou Rosenfeld on how site owners view site search might be interesting to read. The study asked four questions and received 134 responses.

The most interesting question was "We're surprised at how few people and organizations analyze their own site's search queries. If you agree, why do you think it's so uncommon?" Top reasons were not having time or not having the right tools.

You can read all the responses at RosenfeldMedia.com, but I don't think you will be surprised by some of the responses.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:59 AM | Permalink

August 25, 2006

New 411 User Survey Points To Mobile Local Search Demand

Many Internet companies, especially some of the much-hyped Web 2.0 startups, are busy building tools and applications for which no mainstream consumer demand actually exists. In my view that's what killed many of early Internet companies after the first bubble burst – there was no existing use case to sustain them.

But the opposite is true of nascent "mobile local search," a set of half-baked tools and embryonic applications that seek to deliver local content to wireless users. People are eager for local information on the go; and when wireless data services become fast, easy to use and more affordable, you'll see adoption ramp quickly. Remarkably, the user demand for local content on mobile devices is much more developed than the carriers' and wireless content providers' current mobile offerings.

It's in this larger context that I write about a new study released this week from Tellme, an automated voice services provider and directory assistance (411) wholesaler. The company engaged Harris Interactive and surveyed 1,425 adult Americans about directory assistance usage. The study was conducted between March 31 and June 7 of this year.

At the highest level, the survey revealed that the majority (55%) of people calling 411 these days are doing so from wireless phones. (That makes sense because the Internet/local search is often a 411 substitute.) The study also revealed demographic differences in behavior and attitudes toward directory assistance. The findings showed, in addition, that mobile 411 callers are most interested in entertainment (restaurants, bars, movies), shopping and travel-related information. And reading a little deeper you also get a fascinating sense of the immediacy and intensity of user interest in local content in the mobile context.

Directory assistance is a mature, multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. and Europe (although the industry structure in Europe is different). It is based on a consumer pay-per-use model, although a number of providers in the U.S., such as 1-800 Free-411 and 1-800-411-Metro, are now offering free, ad-supported 411 to consumers.

But as I lay out some the Tellme survey findings don't think about "directory assistance" (i.e., "What city, what listing?") per se, think about mobile local search with a voice interface. That's where directory assistance is headed anyway: category search with a voice front end.

From a user-experience perspective the wireless industry must address some of the more challenging usability issues before mobile data becomes mainstream in the U.S. Imperfect though it is, voice is one of the potential responses to some of those wireless usability questions.

On to the survey . . . First, the demographic findings:

As mentioned, 55% of all U.S. adults used 411 in a mobile context. That number was even higher for 18 to 28 year olds (63%). According to the findings only 26% said they used directory assistance most frequently at home. Almost half of women use 411 one or more times a month as compared with 37% of men.

The survey segmented the data by gender and according to three demographic groups: Boomers (41-60), GenXers (29-40) and Millennials (18-28). You can read the segmentation breakdowns by content category usage in the release. In the aggregate, however, when users called 411 they were typically looking for the following information:

• Restaurants & Bars: 43% • Retail Stores: 36% • Hotels/Lodging: 24% • Movie Theaters, Amusement & Recreation: 20% • Transportation: Taxis & Airlines: 10%

Another interesting cluster of findings surrounded use of 411 "alternatives." In other words, what did people do when they didn't call 411? (I for example pay Sprint $1.25 every time I dial 411, so I don't.) Again, there are differences by age and gender. But here are the overall data:

• Called a family member: 58% • Called a friend: 46% • Stopped at a phone booth: 29% • Called a colleague: 27% • Torn page from phone book: 7% • Booted up computer in the car: 7% • Driven to wireless “Hot Spot”: 5%

These creative alternatives – we've all done some version of this – reflect both the determination and the immediate need of mobile users to get information en route to their destinations. I believe these alternative behaviors also show a pent up desire for mobile applications that are more flexible and versatile than today's 411 (i.e., "What city, what listing?"). In other words, it reflects the demand for true "mobile local search" capabilities. Friends at home, for example, can also look up reviews, menus, store hours and so on.

According to mobile analytics firm Telephia 34.6 million U.S. wireless subscribers accessed the Internet from their mobile phones in June of this year. However, none of the top 10 mobile sites had a reach of more than 3%. Here are Telephia's top 10 sites:

1. Yahoo! Mail 2. The Weather Channel (Weather.com) 3. ESPN 4. Google Search 5. MSN Hotmail 6. MapQuest 7. AOL Mail 8. CNN 9. Yahoo! Weather 10. Yahoo! Search

Last September, Telephia reported on the top mobile content categories:

1. Email 2. Weather 3. Search 4. Sports 5. News/Politics 6. Entertainment 7. City Guides/Maps 8. Games 9. Portals 10. Business/Finance

Earlier this year AOL released the results of its own mobile user survey. Among the findings of that survey were that maps were the number one "must-have" new feature. And last July TNS found that local content (driving directions, restaurant reservations, and weather and traffic alerts) topped the list of services that users wanted on their mobile devices.

These myriad data points show the demand among wireless users for local content is strong and that they'll go to some lengths to get it. And unlike some of the startups online -- that will be waiting for a long time for consumers to show up -- users already have an expressed desire for mobile local search. It's now a question of the carriers and content providers getting all their "ducks in a row" and making wireless data services more affordable and more usable.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:51 AM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

Yahoo, MSN, & Google Fall In Customer Satisfaction Survey

The American Customer Satisfaction Index has been released and Yahoo, MSN and Google all fell in points from last year's results. If you look at the 2nd quarter scores and scroll down to the portals and search engines section you will see the ratings. Yahoo was hit the hardest, with a drop of five-percentage points from last year. Ask.com followed with a fall of 1.4%, then MSN falling 1.3%, and then Google falling 1.2% year over year. The only gainer is AOL with a 4.2 percentage point increase year-over-year. There is more coverage on this at DMNews, Bloomberg, News.com and SeattlePI.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:47 AM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Use Frequency Of Google Products Survey

Philipp Lenssen is conducting an online survey asking you How Often Do You Use These Google Products? The products range from Google Web Search to Google Video, from Froogle Mobile to Google Mars and from Google Writely to Google Ride Finder. You can rate your frequency of use for each product on a six-point scale; hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, never but I know it, never and never heard of it. I completed the survey, afterward; it shows you a graphical, real time representation of all the responses. I assume Philipp will be providing a final roundup of numbers when the survey is complete.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:21 AM | Permalink

August 2, 2006

Search Marketers Often Don't Track All Referring Conversions

ClickZ reports on a 360i and SearchIgnite study that shows that search marketers do not look at all "assists," instead they primarily look at the last referring click that lead to the conversion. Here are some highlights of the report:

+ 37.3% of conversions come from consumers clicking on more than one of a marketer's natural or paid listings; it's in these multiple-click scenarios where the clicks' credit can often be misapplied + Over two-thirds (66%) of clicks are from consumers clicking a marketer's listing multiple times + 12.6% of conversions credited to natural search results were preceded by clicks on a marketer's paid listings, nearly twice as many as occur in the converse scenario

The full report can be downloaded by registration here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:03 AM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

Only 11 Percent Of Searchers Use One Word Queries

OneStat.com published a report detailing that only 11.4 percent of searchers use one-word queries, two-word queries 28.9% leads the bunch, followed by three-word queries at 27.85%, four-word queries with 17.1%, five-word with 8.25% and six-word queries with 3.7%. The report also breaks down number of queries used by country; Canadians are more likely to search with four-word queries, Germans use two-word queries 40% of the time and then 28% use one-word queries. OneStat's research was "based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day." More details at OneStat.com.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:58 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2006

MySpace More Popular Than Google Or Yahoo

Bill Tancer over at his HitWise blog has data that claims MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites. This is incredibly important, MySpace.com is more popular that Yahoo Mail, and MySpace's growth of visits has surpassed Google towards the end of May of this year. But as Bill points out, what is most revealing is that the "top search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites" is MySpace and MySpace.com with 1.28%, compared with last years top search term being eBay at .31%. See all the details at HitWise.

Postscript: Yahoo disputes the validity of comparing the MySpace domain to only individual properties in their network, as covered more here, and Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny has some observations as well here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:21 AM | Permalink

July 10, 2006

Search Engine Strategies Latino, Miami, Florida - Day One

Day one of the first ever Search Engine Strategies Latino edition is pretty much complete. The networking cocktail is taking place now, there is a Google party tonight and also some Yahoo boat thing. I have managed to cover the Landscape & Tactics tracks, so here is the roundup.

+ The Opportunity: Tapping Into US Hispanics & Latin America Via Search + Search Landscape: US Hispanics + Search Landscape: Latin America + The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans

I also took pictures of the sessions and outside of the hotel, you can see them here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:44 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Microsoft Employees Use Google More Than MSN?

Philipp Lenssen reported on a Andrew Hitchcock post that detailed search engine usage by search engine firm. It appears that Microsoft employees prefer Google to MSN Search when searching the web. At Microsoft 66.31 percent use Google, 19.65 percent use MSN and 10.18 percent use Yahoo. Yahoo employees aren't afraid to use Google search either, with 29.80 percent of searches conducted on Google and 68.87 percent on Yahoo Search. Google employees seem to be 100 percent loyal to Google search, based on the data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:48 AM | Permalink

May 30, 2006

Calacanis Dings AOL Search

Jason Calacanis has written a forthright piece on the importance of fixing AOL search. He's examined Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL Search, and in particular looked at the position of the first organic result, down to the number of pixels from the top and the left, together with useful screen shots. Danny wrote on the same subject of the positioning of results a couple of years ago. There's absolutely no doubt that the positioning of organic results is very important, but as a searcher there are other things that I worry about rather more.

I ran the same search as Jason across all four search engines, and I think he's being slightly harsh on AOL Search, basing his criticism on one search. However, I fully agree with him that it's not good news for AOL Search that the first search result is below the fold (meaning you have to scroll down to see it); as a searcher I want information presented to me as quickly and effectively as possible - I don't want to hunt around on a page looking for my results.

However, as a searcher I do have other concerns, namely that I want good results that answer my question as quickly as possible and secondly, that I get information about the sites that are being returned to enable me to better decide which one I visit. Obviously I'm hopeful that the first organic result is on topic and trustworthy, especially if I've run a tight search. That isn't always going to be the case however, so I may need some guidance.

Looking at the AOL results I get a title, a line of description (two if I'm lucky) and a URL. Although Google gives me the same information, I also often get update details, a cached version and the chance to search for similar pages. At Yahoo I get the title, a short description of the content showing my search term in context, the opportunity to look at the category the result is in, a cached version and the ability to search for more from that site. I also get the chance to run other searches with their 'also try' option at the top of the page. Over at MSN Search I just get title, brief description and sometimes the chance to see a cached version.

Expanding out my search from those four to Ask for example I find the same problem that Jason found with AOL - my first search results are below adverts and sponsored results and just below the fold. While I still don't get much by way of description I can do a quick peek to see what the page looks like and I immediately get opportunities to narrow or broaden my search. Over at Exalead I also get a thumbnail shot of the page and various useful ways of refining my search.

As a searcher, that's really what interests me the most. Yes, of course, position of search results on the page is very important, but as important, or even moreso in my opinion, is greater information about the results, the ability to quickly refine a search, and of course accurate and on topic results. Jason finishes his piece by saying that AOL needs to love their users more; I heartily agree (and thank him for saying so) but I think the same can be said of most search engine companies. If you want to love me, give me good results, sound information on which to base the decision on which result to visit, and the ability to help me focus my search more effectively.

Postscript From Danny: See also Revisiting Search Engine Ad Breaks for a recent look at a related issue, the percentage of ads to editorial. AOL doesn't do well under that measure, either.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 8:59 AM | Permalink

May 19, 2006

Google's Main Search Accounts For 80% of Google's Traffic

Bill Tancer from Hitwise has posted a detailed breakdown of the percentage market share of the top twenty Google properties. Google.com holds almost 80% of the share, followed by Google Image Search with almost 10%, then Gmail with about 5.5%, followed by Google News with 1.5% and the others are all under 1%. Bill also explains the trends show that "some of the latest Google offerings have yet to capture significant market share in their category," such as Google Finance. There are some interesting stats to chew on by Bill Tancer.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches

Now live via Google Labs is a new Google Trends service, announced today as part of Google Press Day. The service allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. For example, do a trends query on cars, and you can see the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.

Let's take a single search first and go through the motions. A query on ipod gives a chart going back through January 2004, which is as far back as Google Trends data goes. You can see spikes in searches, and these are often labeled with letters that lead to related news items. Google says it is using similar technology to do this as it does with company price charts in Google Finance.

Below the chart, you get some geographical and regional data. For example, you'll see most iPod searches are happening in New York, then in Irvine, then San Francisco, London and so on. That's the city data. Next is a Regional option, which gives you a breakdown by country (iPod searches are big in the UK then the US and Australia). Finally, you can narrow by language (Most searches for iPod are done in English, then Japanese).

Want to narrow in? You can do a variety of things. Using the drop down boxes, you can pick a particular month, such as last month. You can also pick a particular region, like last month just in the United States.

You aren't limited to single words. Enter multiple words by commas to do comparisons, such as google,yahoo,microsoft. That query shows you each term in a different color, and you can then see all the breakdowns for each word, as well. You can do up to five words in total. Want to do multiword queries? There's ways to do that -- check out the help page for more.

Sometimes when you do a search, you'll get something like this message:

Your terms - larry page - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

What's happening here is that Google's working to help protect search privacy. There's a slight chance someone might enter something like their own name along with something embarrassing or private. Potentially, Google Trends could reveal this information.

My Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches article explains this issue more, and it's something Google used successfully to argue against handing over query data to the US Department Of Justice. Given this, it needed to put some protections into place. That mechanism is to only show data about queries that happen often.

"Something has to be in the hundreds of times per week for you to see trends," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience, about the service. This is also touched on in the help page on the Google Trends site.

Some things to keep in mind. For example, Mayer cited to me a yankees,red socks comparison. Searches for Yankees are well above the Red Socks, so they must be more popular! Well, it's also a case that there are more people in New York than Boston, so there are more people potentially searching for the Yankees.

(Postscript: So I'm an idiot -- it's Red Sox, of course. And yankees,red sox for 2006 shows Red Sox actually much closer to Yankees. So cop-out time, the point in general remains valid. There are things that can skew the stats in ways you might not expect. For example, if you search for a particular company and you see growth in their name, are they more popular? In 2005, you might think so for Kryptonite. But go broader, you'll see a spike in 2004 associated with the Kryptonite locks-can-be-picked-by-ballpoint-pin-fiasco. That incident might have helped fuel some of the rise in following year -- searches that aren't necessarily reflecting a popular view of the company).

Another caveat. The geographic data is based on IP targeting, which isn't perfect. In particular, people who use AOL are often seen as if they are in Virginia, regardless of their true location.

How about query spam? Google's got a system designed to help filter for this, either if intentionally done or accidentally. For example, if it sees many queries all coming from the same IP address, that might be caught. Similarly, if it sees many queries coming from different cookies, it could be caused by the same person who rejects standing cookies. Each search would generate a new cookie, so potentially the same single person might be seen as different individuals.

"We are savvy to that case and make sure we saw queries from 100 different unique cookies that aren't fresh," she said.

Also, the data isn't filtered or consolidated in the way things happen in Google Zeitgeist or other search data mining tools. In other words, car brings back different results than cars. And if you want to see the dark underbelly of search, you can see in sex,ipod that if Apple sold a sexPod, it would leave iPod in the dust. You can also search for explicit adult terms, should you have the hankering.

Finally, Google rightly warns that this is more a play thing that something you can use for definitive predictions of popularity.

For a different spin on Google Trends, check out Barry's post, Fun With Google Trends. Now that we've warned you not to take the data too seriously, time for some comparisons anyway :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:26 PM | Permalink

April 27, 2006

Revisiting Search Engine Ad Breaks

Originally, the news of Google's broad matching change had me thinking that Google was adding more ad positions to their search results pages. I've since talked with Google and understand now this isn't the case. I've broken what is happening into a new story. Meanwhile, I think this story is still a useful reminder on the number of ad positions each search engine offers across the board.

Here's the rundown I did from June 2004:

2004

Paid Links

Free Links

Total

% Free

Yahoo

71%

AOL

56%

MSN

55%

Google

50%

Ask

48%

Average

56%

And the situation today?

2006

Paid Links

Free Links

Total

% Free

Change

AOL

56%

MSN

56%

Ask

56%

Google

48%

-2%

Yahoo

42%

-30%

Average

51%

-5%

Google*

42%

-13%

The two big players -- Google and Yahoo -- have decreased the percentage of free listings shown. To be clear, on Google, you still have the same ten free listings shown since Google began, but they've added another paid spot. On Yahoo, you have 10 less free listings than they used to show, plus they've added more paid spots.

Aside from number of ads, the positioning is an issue. Google's long had many ads running down the side of its page, something the other major players have all largely imitated. To me, that's not been irritating, because plenty of editorial listings were still "above the fold" or visible without scrolling.

In contrast, dumping ads on the top of pages might drive users away. Ask used to do this quite aggressively, as Ads On Ask & Could Paid Listings Take Prime Position? from last year covers in more detail. Ask Jeeves to Reduce Paid Ads covers how Ask pulled back on the ads because it found fewer ads boosted user retention -- at least in the US. In the UK, they'll still run up to four ads at the top of the page and five below.

FYI, Google did increase from two to three ads at the top of results last August (it also has been testing ads at the bottom of pages since November).

For the record, here's the current top-bottom-side breakdown in chart form:

2006

Top

Bottom

Side

Paid Links

% Top

AOL

50%

MSN

38%

Ask

38%

Yahoo

29%

Google

27%

Average

36%

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:51 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2006

Search Stats Don't Have to be Boring

There's no shortage of data related to search marketing, with everything from market share numbers to frequency of search terms analyzed by market research groups. Some find all this data deathly boring—but it doesn't have to be. In fact, with the appropriate presentation style, search data can be downright entertaining, as it was at a recent Search Engine Strategies panel. Christine Churchill has the rundown on the panel in today's SearchDay article, Searchonomics: Search Statistics Made Fun.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:27 AM | Permalink

April 21, 2006

This Internet Thing Isn't Just a Fad

New research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that the internet has become a crucial source of information at major moments and milestones in our lives:

Our surveys show that 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.

While this new research doesn't even use the phrase "search engine," the implication is pretty clear that people are searching to find this critical information. And remarkably, just 5% said the information found was misleading, which in the inimitable words of Good Morning Silicon Valley blogger John Paczkowski, "is either an encouraging sign of search effectiveness or a worrisome warning about credulity."

More on the Internets Growing Role in Lifes Major Moments is available as a summary or full pdf report.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:21 PM | Permalink

Marketing to Hispanics Part II Released

Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic released part II of his Marketing to Hispanics report, the first part we discussed here. I have pulled out some of the highlights of part two, with Nacho's help.

* Search engine optimization is the most popular marketing tactic to reach US Hispanics; more importantly, however, it's likely the most important internet marketing effort because it relies on a pull strategy, based on users' needs, rather than a push strategy that's focused on brand awareness and potential reach.

* Shows a cool chart with a visual presentation of how pull marketing attracts a more targeted market like with the Hispanic audience and is based on persuasion, whereas permission marketing is more about communities, occupying a middle ground in consumer's intent, and push marketing is used more for reach and awareness.

* When it comes to reaching Hispanics, search engine marketing is highly underdeveloped, with Hispanic advertising agencies having ignored search due to a lack of knowledge about the tools and techniques of SEM.

* In part 1, it referred to the language barrier as an important challenge. He mentions that the second-highest hurdle is the lack of tracking marketing results within the Hispanic market. Hispanic businesses and advertising agencies need only make use of web analytics software; and if they were to do so, their survey would not find that 30% of respondents don't target Hispanics because "senior management is not convinced on the ROI."

* Nacho mentions that when it comes to search engines, some believe that there is only one option for targeting Hispanics: Spanish-language search. Instead, marketers should be looking at the bigger picture: Hispanics doing search in any language. He points to "the database of intentions" from John Battelle's book The Search to stress the point that he advertiser doesn't control what the user wants; only the user controls what he or she wants, and that can be done in any language. It's common for the thought process of US Hispanics to take place in English and so they speak in English, or other times to think in Spanish and so speak in Spanish. The same is true of search: The Hispanic user will search in both languages, based on their "desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."

* Nacho says that what keeps him up at night worrying about the US Hispanic and the Latin American markets is: If Latino-focused ad agencies merely add SEM or any other Internet-based programs to their list of services as if it were just an SKU and pretend to know how to implement them-but don't deliver results-clients will rightly be frustrated. As a result, such agencies are damaging the entire industry. SEM requires a full commitment to learn; and it doesn't take a couple of days to pick up, either. To drive results, as with all media, it takes practice and skill. Ad agencies must invest the time and human resources to be able to deliver results. Imagine what happens when a client who allocated $20 million from the marketing budget finds out that an intern is handing its SEM campaign.... A viable option for Hispanic ad agencies is to partner with market leaders, which was the most likely case among those we tracked that were offering search marketing solutions in a professional manner.

The full report can be viewed at http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/hernandez2.asp.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:55 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

Typo Domain Spotting Tool & Domain Registration Stats

I've got some domain name related items I'm throwing into this post: a new typo-domain spotting tool from Microsoft, new stats on the difficulty of getting a short domain plus stats on how many sites there are on the web.

Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol is a new downloadable tool from Microsoft Research that lets you discover typo domains, domains that are misspellings of popular web sites.

Why bother checking? So you can know who might be trying to tap into your brand name or so you can protect children or naive web surfers from landing at the wrong sites.

If it's the latter, anti-phishing features built into the toolbars from Google, Yahoo and MSN Microsoft Windows Live are likely more useful for you and won't require the .NET download.

Typo domains have gotten renewed attention in part because of recent reports on how people are earning large amounts of money off of them. See these past articles from the SEW Blog for background on this:

I'm still working on a follow up about the issue and how these domains are funded by the major search players of Google and Yahoo. The short good news answer is neither company says that typo domains are kosher. If they spot them, they're supposed to be ousting them from their domain monetization programs. The short bad news answer is that it seems like there's much more work that could be done to kill these off.

Need a good example of a type domain? Try windowsmessenger .com. When I was on a trip recently, I wanted my wife to try and reach me on my watch through MSN Messenger (a long story that I'll explain some other time on my personal blog, Daggle).

I told her to install MSN Messenger. She guessed at the domain, ending up at this place. It looks like the MSN Messenger site, which isn't surprising since it frames the real site in order to run Google AdSense ads alongside it. In my view, that's misleading and the type of thing I hate to see supported.

Yes, it's not a proper typo domain, in that it's not a misspelling of the real messenger.msn.com site. But it's close enough in intent to be annoying. FYI, messenger.masn .com is a better example of a typo domain for MSN Messenger. The new typo tool helped me spot that one. And yes, it's carrying ads from Google.

Back to the tool, I thought one of the best features is how you can point it at a web page, then watch what other sites get contacted as a result of your visit. For example, a visit to msn.messenger.com (the real site) shows me that Omniture gets contacted (probably to track my visit for Microsoft), as does live.com and msn.com (probably my live.com and msn.com cookies kicking in). Google also gets contacted, the result of my Google Toolbar calling back to the mother ship to get PageRank data.

In other news, The Search For A Domain Name came out at the end of last month has lots of interesting stats on the availability of domain names. Want a three letter domain name? Sorry, they're all registered. It also has stats on the length of domain names and other tidbits.

And who owns a domain name? Whois information can tell you, but only if it's accurate. ICANN has a system designed to let people report if they find inaccurate or missing whois info about a domain. Spotted via ResourceShelf, now out is a report (PDF format) on how the system performed over the past year. The system got 63 percent of problems solved.

Finally, got a domain name? You'll probably want a web site next. April 2006 Web Server Survey from Netcraft reports there are now more than 80 million sites on the web, with charts gong back to October 1995.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:26 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2006

60% Of Search Marketers Should Be Targeting Hispanics But Are Not

Nacho Hernandez released a special report on the Hispanic market yesterday that showed approximately 60% of search marketers are not targeting the growing Hispanic market. The study surveyed 1026 respondents and found the following "key findings;"

Even though the opportunity is great, not all companies today are doing something to design marketing efforts specifically for Hispanics. Only 36% of respondents said they are already doing something about it, and that proportion reached 40% when segmenting those just in the US. At the same time, 23% across the board said they have not done so yet but have plans to. Therefore, we can consider that roughly two of three professionals are aware of its importance and need to do something about it.

Nacho's study drills down into segments of Hispanic; Mexicans (67%), Puerto Ricans (9%), Cubans (4%). They also ask how the current search marketers target the Hispanic market. It looks like about 28% take a local approach, 26% take a national approach, 24% take a regional approach, 14% take a global approach and 9% "other."

Read the full report here and also take a look at Mindy Charski write up.

Keep in mind SES Latino is coming up this July, more information here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:45 AM | Permalink

March 30, 2006

China Search Market Usage To Expect Decline In Growth

Shak informed me about this article that shows the growth of China's search engine market is expected to slow down over the next 18-months. Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, blames the expected decline in growth of search usage to "poor user experience, unstable advertising effects, and some irregular channel operations."

The China search market is considered to be in the "initiation stage," and the search results do not meet searchers' expectations.

According to Analysys International's research of 1500 samples, only 20% search engine advertisers obtained results that exceeded their expectations, while about 29% didn't get the results they had expected and were considering reducing or suspending their search engine marketing expenses.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

March 10, 2006

Will Local Search Engines Replace National Search Engines for Local Search?

ClickZ reports "about half the panelists believe local search engines will replace national search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN when it comes to specific market needs," according to Borrell Associates's "2006 Local Search Advertising" report.

Two-thirds of the panelists say that this can happen as soon as five-years from now. My own personal feeling is that this won't happen. Yahoo, Google and the other engines, in my opinion, are doing a wonderful job with their local search portals, and the vertical integration with their main search portals. In addition, Google and MSN have wonderful search advertising targeting, with Yahoo not lagging that far behind. But with local search revenue to hit $987 million this year and double the year after, there is plenty of money to be shared amongst all the engines.

An executive summary of the report is available here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2006

60% Oppose Search Engines Storing Search Behaviors

A study conducted by the University of Connecticut showed that 60% of users are opposed to search engines permanently storing their search behaviors. The study was in response to the US Government requesting search data from the search engines. The 23% of 800 Americans surveyed use a search engine more then once per day. They were split down the middle on the question of; should search engines provide search queries to the government, whereas 30% are in favor of the government monitoring search data. The study also shows that "only 13% of the public feel extremely or very confident that the search behavior collected by Internet companies will remain private." Read the full study here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:32 AM | Permalink

February 16, 2006

AOL Leads in Online Conversions; Google Falls in Last

WebSideStory conducted a new study that revealed Conversion Rates for Each Major Search Engine. For the month of January, AOL lead the pack with a conversion rate of 6.17%, followed by MSN with 6.03%, Yahoo with 4.07% and finally Google with 3.83%. The study includes both organic and paid search referrals from the search engines. The study shows that the four major search engines listed above performed "above the median average for all search engines, which was 1.97 percent for the month of January."

Ali Behnam, senior digital marketing consultant for WebSideStory, explained that the possible reason why AOL and MSN have a higher conversion rate when compared to Google and Yahoo is most likely because AOL and MSN are "portals rich in content and services, " which may appeal more towards the "buyer friendly demographic."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:11 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2006

Marketers Find Google Ads Slightly More Effective Than Yahoo & Well Above MSN

Survey: Advertisers Say Search Ads On Google Better Than Yahoo, MSN from MediaPost reports on an Outsell survey of 1,200 advertisers last November that found 71 percent found search ads on Google were effective, compared to 62 percent on Yahoo and 49 percent on MSN. But those most likely to find Google as "extremely" effective had slightly smaller average budgets than Yahoo and MSN spenders.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:55 AM | Permalink

January 30, 2006

New Study Reports that Search Sites Provides Twice the Conversion Rate When Compared With Other Acquisition Sources

The Dow Jones story: Search Sites Better At Getting Shoppers To Buy: Study, reports on new research from WebSideStory that shows search engines (both paid and organic listings) provide more than twice the conversion rates than other forms of Internet advertising and marketing.

However, direct navigation offered the highest conversion rate. The sites used in the study cover five product categories.

From the article: The study defines conversion rate as the percentage of visitors to a site who view an ad or clicking on a search result and purchase a product or service.

Numbers

Search Search Sites had a conversion rate of 2.3%, meaning that for every 100 consumers clicking on a search result or advertisement, 2.3 people made a purchase.

Other Forms of Internet Marketing Banner ads, affiliate marketing links, comparison shopping search sites* and other online marketing efforts had a conversion rate of 0.96%.

* Note, that shopping engines are not considered in the main search category.

Search Bypass: Direct Navigation/Bookmarks Direct to a company's web site (including via a bookmark) offered a conversion rate of 4.23%.

Where did the data come from: The study collected data from Web sites that sell apparel, toys, electronics, sporting goods and leisure products. Among the most successful were toy sites. When reached through a search engine, they had a conversion rate of 4.85% while Web sites selling computers and electronics had a conversion rate of 1.35%, the study found.

The sites used in the study generate more than $3 billion in annual sales online in five categories listed above.

This news release from WebSideStory has more including precise definitions for each category.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:26 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2006

Lack of Search Marketing During Christmas Season Hurt FTD's Bottom Line, Head of Marketing Replaced

For your, "the importance of search marketing folder."

An article from DMNews: FTD: Online Search Misstep Cost Sales, points out that FTD (the flower delivery people) said that not doing more search engine marketing during the Christmas season caused the consumer end of FTD not to do as well as they had planned. The comments were made on Wednesday when FTD announced their quarterly earnings.

From the statement (full text here): The consumer business's order growth for the 2005 Christmas season was below expectations [because of] our decision not to pursue high-cost order volume associated with online search," FTD president/CEO Michael J. Soenen said in a statement. "In anticipation of continued competitiveness in the online search environment and to better manage the consumer segment business going forward, we have made management changes within this segment including the replacement of our head of marketing."

I wonder if the now replaced head of marketing received some flowers to make him or her feel better? (-:

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, FTD's Head Of Marketing Replaced Over Failure In Maximizing Search.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:06 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

New Google Study Looks at How Web Pages Are Authored

We don't have the time to offer an in-depth analysis at the moment (Danny or Chris might do so in the the future) but web page authors, content developers, seo personnel and others who would like a better understanding of how web pages are built, will want to take a look at a new study published by Google that was conducted in December 2005.

The complete report titled, "Web Authoring Statistics" is now available on the Google Code site.

Google engineers analyzed a sample of slightly over a billion document and extracted info about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.

Here are just a few thing's that I noticed during a quick read:

Web pages use an average of 19 different page elements. Top Top 5 Elements are: 1. head 2. html 3. title 4. body 5. a

at the bottom the list are 14. link 15. form 16. input

The HTML Element

The most-used attribute on html elements is xmlns, from misguided people using XHTML but sending it as text/html. They even (just) outnumber the people who specify the lang attribute!

The Meta Element

"[a] huge number of markup errors involving the meta element."
Most common values from the "name" element are keywords, description, and robot. Quick comment. Danny pointed out as years ago the crafting and using the keywords meta tag is most often (when it comes to general web engines) not a good use of ones time.
"The Dublin Core people can take some comfort from the fact that although their keywords didn't appear in the top ten chart above, they were quite well featured in the next few dozen. Here are the ten most used dc.foo values, most popular first: dc.title, dc.language, dc.creator, dc.subject, dc.publisher, dc.description, dc.identifier, dc.date, dc.format, dc.rights. In fact the order maps relatively closely to the frequency of similar metadata in other constructs, like class names or rel values. Nice to know people are consistent!"

Link Relationships "HTML has two link relationship attributes, rel and rev, which apply to the link and a elements. What values are most used?"

Top 5

link-rel="stylsheet"
link-rel="icon"
link-rel="shorcut"
link-rel="alternate"
link-rel="next"

The a rel=nofollow appears at number six.

I'm just scratching the surface on the massive amount of stats and graphs this report provides. It's a must for any person interested in web page authorship.

A tip o' the cap to Michel for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:00 PM | Permalink

Google Video Now Features Premier Content, New Design Corrects "Big Mistake"

Bloomberg's Jonny Thaw's story: Google Says It Made Mistake in Design of Online Store, includes comments from Google's Marissa Mayer who said that the design of the Google Video home page (which received a makeover yesterday) didn't do a good job of promoting content that was available for sale from the new Google Video Store.

From the article: ``We made a big mistake, "Mayer, who oversees all of Google's search products, said yesterday. ``You can't come out and launch a product like Google Video and say `CSI' and `Survivor' are there if they're not on the home page.''

However, Mayer said the response to Google Video has been "absolutely fantastic."

The remainder of Thaw's article includes a number of stats from Nielsen//NetRatings including:

Google's video site attracted 3.04 million U.S. users in December
Microsoft Corp.'s MSN video had 9.46 million users
Yahoo video site had 2.15 million

As far as iTunes go, Thaw also uses Nielsen//NetRatings numbers to report that iTunes has a user base of numbered 20.7 million and according to Apple, they've sold sold 8 million videos and TV shows since October, when the video iPod debuted.

Finally, Thaw points out that at this point copy protected material purchased from iTunes can be played on portable devices or laptops that are not connected to the Internet.

Other services in addition to iTunes including MovieLink, Vongo (my new fave), and CinemaNow (all three U.S. only services) do allow for offline viewing of downloaded content.

Brad Hill and Nathan Weinberg point out the new look of the Google Video Home Page. Both note that the new page offers 24 thumbnails of programming for sale. If you're interested in a comparison, here's a screen cap of the previous Google Video Home Page.

In terms of promoting video content for sale, shortly after the Google Video Store launched, Google was promoting content like CSI and NBA highlights with links on the primary Google home page. A post on Searchblog and then one on our site discussed if this was a promo for a Google service or an advertisement since the content being linked to was for sale.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:04 PM | Permalink

January 24, 2006

New Poll Finds Web Users Want Google to Keep Data Private; Full Text Access to Report Also Available

Elinor Mills at News.com clues us into a poll conducted over the weekend and reported by Verne Kopytoff in the in the San Francisco Chronicle and Michael Bazeley in the San Jose Mercury News that shows 56% of those surveyed don't want Google handing over any info to the government.

From the SF Chronicle article: As part of the findings, 56 percent of respondents said they do not want Google to turn over any information to the government. More than three quarters of the respondents, or 77 percent, did not even know that Google collected information that personally identifies them. Google keeps records of IP addresses, which can be traced back to individual computers. In cases where the government is trying to prosecute a crime, according to the survey, the respondents were more open to Google sharing information. About 14 percent said that they were willing to give the government access in such cases, while 44 percent said that they were willing in only certain cases.

Mike Bazeley points out that many of those surveyed would stop using Google if they gave the government the data they requested.

From the Mercury News article: More than a third of the survey-takers -- 38 percent -- said they would stop using Google if the company ever turned over information about their searches to the government. The survey did not ask people for opinions about Yahoo, Microsoft or AOL.

The poll was made up of a random sample of 1,017 Internet users over the age of 18 and conducted by the Ponemon Institute [via email], a privacy research organization (aka think tank) group based in Michigan.

I'm interested to see if the search companies who handed over info to the feds (none of it with personally identifiable info as Danny clearly points out here) lose any market share and/or total number of searches in the future due to sharing data with the government.

Also worth a look (if you haven't done so already) is Danny's post: Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches; a statement from MSN along with plenty of reader comments on MSN Search's WebLog, a review of and links to the court filings, and some background reports on privacy, the Internet and related topics from the Congressional Research Service.

Postscript: Thank you to the The Ponemon Institute who have given us permission to post the the full text of the report containing the results of their recent poll (PDF).

Posted by Gary Price at 5:07 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Technorati Adds Trend Charts, Other Features, Rubel Offers "Hacking" Tips

Via Micro Persuasion, this post from the Technorati blog pointing out several new features that are now available including a blog finder widget, trend charts (enter a term, see how many posts in the past 30 days mention it) and improved extracts (what others call snippets.)

For more Technorati fun, take a look at this post from Steve Rubel from early last month: Ten Technorati Hacks. I wonder if Steve or someone from Technorati is talking to O'Reilly about a book. (-:

Posted by Gary Price at 2:56 PM | Permalink

November 11, 2005

Google Provides Search Stats By Industry Sector

Nice spot by that man Peter Da Vanzo of (The Original) Search Engine Blog, a page over at Google full of metrics about how people in different industries search. Pitching that travel client on search? Help yourself to some stats from Google to help close the sale, for example.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:36 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

SEMPO Survey Of Search Marketing Industry Seeks Participants

It's SEMPO survey time again! SEMPO Survey Probes SEM/SEO Issues from Kevin Lee at ClickZ gives you a rundown on how the survey aims to measure the state of the search marketing industry. I'd encourage everyone to participate, because it's one of the few surveys out there driven out of the search marketing community. You can take it from here. State of the Search Marketing Industry 2004 from SearchDay covers results from last year's survey. Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, SEMPO SURVEY: Search Engine Marketing -- Trends and Metrics.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:39 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2005

Google Print Is Google's Ninth Most Popular Service

With all the debate over what Google Print might do to publishers, I was wondering if anyone was even using the service? Surely it wouldn't even crack the top ten of the most used Google services. As it turns out, indeed it does.

I turned to Bill Tancer of competitive intelligence service Hitwise, who showed on his great blog recently how most traffic from Google Print flows "downstream" to online book sellers.

That's not surprising, given that Google provides links to booksellers as part of the pages it displays in Google Print. FYI, last time we checked, Google said it does not earn of off any book sales generated from visits that Google Print generates.

But how many people actually use Google Print at all? Bill said Hitwise couldn't generate audience estimates, but he did give me a percentage breakdown of traffic to all Google sites for a one week period ending Nov. 5. The summary is below (rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent for all visits, except those below a tenth of a percent):

Google Web Search: 79.9 percent
Google Image Search: 9.2 percent
Google Mail/Gmail: 5.6 percent
Google News: 1.6 percent
Google Maps: 0.8 percent
Froogle: 0.7 percent
Google Scholar: 0.6 percent
Google Groups/Groups 2 Beta: 0.5 percent
Google Print: 0.4 percent
Google Earth: 0.3 percent
Google Directory: 0.2 percent
Google Local: 0.1 percent
Google Answers: 0.1 percent
Google AdWords: 0.06 percent
Google Desktop Search: 0.04 percent
Google Talk: 0.02 percent

As you can see, Google Print doesn't have a ton of use compared to other Google services -- but it was still impressive to see it cracked the top ten.

Also notice how Google Local is below Google Maps. Google recently turned Google Maps into Google Local, and it's not hard to see why. If Google Maps was getting more traffic, the merging the two was an easy way to get more usage of local.

However, earlier this year Google said that Google Local was more popular than Froogle. It could be that Hitwise might not be counting the Google Maps/Google Local visits correctly due to the change. I'm checking with Bill on this and will postscript a follow up.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:37 PM | Permalink

Why We Use Various Search Engines

InternetRetailer has done some nice charts off of a Majestic Research/comScore report looking at why we use particular search engines (for Google, it's the results; for others, it's because you're doing other things). The stats also look at awareness of paid links and tolerance of demographic and behavior targeting. Here's a summary:

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.
AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.
MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.
Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

As for privacy, 58 percent said they weren't worried about being demographically or behaviorally targeted as long as it was disclosed and they could opt out. And 27 percent said they'd keep using a search engine even if they couldn't opt out.

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

November 3, 2005

Pricegrabber Survey Says No Holiday Blues This Year

Pricegrabber has released the results of a holiday shopping survey, and despite consumer gloom reported elsewhere, it looks like online retailers are going to have a merry holiday season.

93 percent of respondents agreed that they expect to shop and buy more online this year than last year. The survey found that 46 percent of respondents will shop online more this holiday compared to previous years specifically because of higher gasoline prices.

Online shoppers also expect to dedicate high percentages of their holiday buying online, saying they expect to do 50 percent of their shopping online.

More details in the press release.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:08 PM | Permalink

November 1, 2005

Apparel Buyers Really, Really Like Search

New research from Yahoo and Compete, Inc. tracked Internet search and transaction activity related to retail apparel Web sites over one year. The study found that search was used by 20% of the 25 million unique monthly visitors, but also found that nearly 80% of all people who purchased apparel offline after using Internet search reported that search influenced their store visit and purchase. Apparel searchers also spent more than 30% more time when visiting retail sites than non-search visitors.

These results are from Yahoo's continuing "Life Series" that's examining the relationships between search and major activities in our daily lives. The previous study looked at financial services. The press release for today's findings is not yet online but will be available at Yahoo's Press Center when posted.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 4:41 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

SEO Big With Small & Medium Sized Businesses

No Guesswork Here: Web Sites Work For SMBs at InternetNews.com has a few search stat tidbits worth noting. A survey has found that among ways small and medium-sized business promote their sites, SEO is ranked second, 54 percent, just after email at 60 percent. That's SEO as in non-paid search. Paid search (or PPC) was ranked fourth at 20 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

Broadband Adoption in U.S. Homes Continues to Increase

Some new numbers just released from Nielsen//NetRatings report that the adoption of broadband in U.S. homes continues to increase.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings the number of Americans with broadband access at home reached 42 percent of the U.S. population in August, increasing 16 percent since the beginning of this year.

In January 2005, 103.8 million Americans had broadband access; by August, that figure had grown to 120.8 million. These figures were compiled from the Nielsen//NetRatings panel and report the connection speeds of those with Internet access at home.

The news brief goes on to say: in August 2005, the percent of active U.S. Internet users connecting online via broadband from home reached an all-time high, at 61.3 percent, compared with 51.4 percent of active Internet users in August last year...In contrast, fewer Internet surfers are using a narrowband connection to go online. Among at-home Internet users, those using a narrowband connection have decreased by 10 percent since August last year, from 60.6 million to 54.3 million in August 2005. Currently, 38.7 percent of active Internet users continue to rely on a narrowband connection, compared with 48.6 percent in August 2004.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:35 AM | Permalink

September 28, 2005

A Snapshot of the Search Marketing Industry

A new study by Jupiter Research and iProspect looks at several aspects of the search marketing industry, and draws some interesting conclusions about how well search marketers are performing, the effectiveness of organic vs. paid search marketing campaigns, and obstacles encountered in implementing search engine optimization techniques on client web sites, among other findings. See today's SearchDay article, How are Search Marketers Performing?, for more on the new research.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:28 AM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Travel Search Engines Bump Hotels From Top Search Listings

A study out from SEM technology firm SEMphonic finds that travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Hotels.com push out actual hotel sites such as Marriott and Radisson from top results of "247 hotel-related keywords." Travel aggregators or travel search engines get 39 percent of the top 50 spots in paid listings, while hotels get 17 percent of the listings. Hotels do better in organic listings, getting 48 percent of the top 50 spots.

The firm hasn't released the study to any one but DMNews yet, so it's hard to poke at it more. You can read more in their article, Travel Sites Push Hotels Out of Searches.

Top of my head -- I tend not to like studies that dig deeper than the first page of results. What's happening in the top 10 spots? That's what matters. There's a side remark in the DMNews story noting that when you look at the top 10 organic listings, Marriott, Radisson and Starwood hotel sites do well there.

I guess the takeaway point is this. If you run a travel site, make sure you're doing everything possible to ensure that your official site is showing up well, if that's important to you. As someone sick of always running into your affiliates rather than the official site, I know it's important to me.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:30 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2005

Google's China Situation Better Than You Might Think -- And Other China Search News

The China Internet Network Information Center has released a new China Online Search Market Survey Report (PDF file) outlining the search market in China that's well worth a read. And despite headlines you may have seen from this report that painted a gloomy picture for Google, actually reading the report makes me think Google's much better off than you might think.

Let's do some headlines first:

Google loses China market share (BBC)
Google losing ground in China (AP)

The conventional wisdom from limited research released previously on search in China has put home grown search engine Baidu as the category leader. However, when you drill down into this recent report, you find that in specific types of searches, Google probably has the healthier outlook. IE, Baidu may lead with those interested in downloading music, but for those seeking things like shopping and business information, Google is very strong.

Let's dive in with the report's breakdown of the Beijing market share:

Baidu: 51.5%
Google: 32.9%
Sohu: 4.6%
Sina: 4.0%
Yahoo: 3.7%
Others: 3.3%

Market shares for Shanghai and Guangzhou are also listed, but the figures aren't super radically different, so I didn't make a chart up showing all of them side-by-side. Mainly, Baidu slips below the 50 percent mark for these other cities but is still the leader. Google always holds at a healthy second. Yahoo (which can mean 3721, Yisou, Yahoo China or Yahoo anywhere) comes up into third place.

Some important caveats on the figures, however. The report says:

A search engine's market share is determined by the number of users who use that particular search engine as their only or primary one, divided by the number of total users.
"Baidu users" refers to those who use Baidu as their only or primary search engine, and so on.

In other words (as I read it), if someone said that "Baidu" was their primary search engine, then that person counts entirely toward Baidu regardless of whether they also use Google, Sohu or another service. That produces a skew to the data. You obviously want to be the first choice of users, but it could be that for particular types of searches, another search engine might rank better than for the overall totals.

To me, a better way of looking at search market share is to look at actual volume of searches. Our pages for stats from NetRatings, Hitwise and comScore all have figures using this type of basis along with explanations of why it is important.

In fact, the report notes later that Baidu/Google or Google/Baidu are the most popular combinations for searchers, making up 55 percent of those who use two or more search engines.

The report also has a chart showing popularity of search engine by those brand new to searching in the last 6 months. Baidu leads at 48.2 percent, followed by Sohu at 19.6 percent and then Google at 12.5 percent.

There's also a breakdown of what people search for, which is incredibly revealing. More people at Google search for web sites, shopping and business information and reference material than corresponding searchers at Baidu. What's big -- what's powering searches at Baidu? Apparently downloadable music.

In other words, perhaps Baidu is so popular in China because it has served as a type of Napster for the nation. If so, then Google has far less to worry about in the "race" for China, since if these are illegal downloads, it's not a business it wants or can be in. Indeed, just before Baidu went public, it had to act to remove links to pirated music to help sooth copyright concerns.

A chart showing those who use Baidu as their "primary" search engine and Google as "secondary" search engine is fascinating. Baidu "primary" users turn massively to Google for if they can't find their search need (outside of music search) or for undefined "alternative" uses. In contrast, what do those who use Google as their primary search engine depend on at Baidu for their secondary needs? Music search.

A later chart breaks down market share in across a particular vertical segments. In other words, what percentage of all music searchers go to Baidu? A big 74.6 percent. Baidu keeps the majority of searchers also for images and photos (67.8%) and online games (61.0%). After that, it still has more searchers in all but two categories, but the margin over Google is less.

Google wins in the share of those seeking maps, city guides and travel info -- 41.8 percent of searchers to Baidu's 38.8 percent. Google also ties with Baidu for those seeking shopping and business information, 42.5 percent.

There are other Google wins I think are significant. The more money you have, the more likely you are to search with Google. At the highest income level surveyed, those with 5,000 yuan per month (about US $600) or higher, Google has 58.1 percent of the searchers to Baidu's 25.7 percent.

The report summary says that Google's lost market share to Baidu and suggest the worry for Google is that a rising generation might not consider it "cool." But if that's "cool" in terms of downloading free music, Napster's coolness didn't help it thrive. It's not the type a cool that a business may want to be.

My other problem with this is the report showed no historic trends that I can see. Outside of the survey of those brand new to the web, there's no tracking of Google's "lost" share, though I have no reason to doubt Baidu growth in popularity. However, the aforementioned AP article does have some market share increases for Beijing (Baidu up 10 percent) and says Gogole was the largest in all three cities just six months ago, although it too says the report doesn't share figures on this.

Elsewhere in the report are nice overview demographics of searchers in China:

86 percent of Beijing's internet users have used online search
On any day, 38 percent are using search engines, along with frequency of searching
40 percent of searchers are students, nearly half of which are in secondary school
Non student searchers are mostly (62 percent) aged 25-40
66 percent of searchers use two or more brand name search engines
Male/female breakdown of searchers
Breakdown by education (Google has a whopping 75 percent of users with a doctorate and 50 percent of those with postgraduate degrees. Baidu is the industry leader in all other education categories starting from middle school and including those with 4 year degrees)

For more, the LA Times had an excellent article three weeks ago, "Baidu.com Went From Unknown to No. 1 Search Engine in China" from the LA Times. It was here and is still listed on Google News as if it is there, but now you have to buy here.

The article looked at how the Chinese governments blocking of Google has helped boost Baidu presence in China, suggesting even that Baidu employees might report things the Chinese government might want to block -- an accusation Baidu's CFO said he wasn't aware of. I'd been wondering if blocking like this, however it happened, could have helped with Baidu's rise. Apparently so.

Internet Search Giants Hurry Into Chinese Market from Dow Jones is another nice recent read looking at the growth of the Chinese search marketing and interest in it. A nice refresher, for those wanting to catch up on recent moves.

Meanwhile, Autonomy readies for content wars looks at how enterprise search company Autonomy has partnered with one of China's biggest internet companies to create a news and video search service for the country.

Finally, I mentioned last week the new Chinawhite blog where Shakil Khan -- known as Shak on to those of various search forums -- will be covering news of search out of China. Check it out. And if you want to learn more about Shak, China White from Matt Marshall over at SiliconBeat out today has a great profile of him.

Postscript: You'll find that LA Times article now available free to registered members at the San Jose Mecury News here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:44 PM | Permalink

August 2, 2005

Stats: Time Spent With Various Yahoo and Google Services

Bambi Francisco's article: Why Google may need instant messaging offers a bunch of new and interesting stats from Majestic Research about Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Gmail.

Yahoo Mail accounts for 42% of Yahoo users' online time
Yahoo Messenger accounts for 22% of Yahoo users' time
Gmail captured 45% of all time spent on Google in June
Time spent on Google's e-mail service outpaced that of Google's main search function, which drew 90% of Google's unique visitors in June
Yahoo Messenger attracted about 19% of Yahoo's unique visitors in June and accounted for 23% of total page views
Time spent on Yahoo outpaced time spent on Google by more than 9 to 1, according to Majestic

Postcript: The Red Herring Article: No Time Lost on Search, has a bit more.

Google generates nearly all of its revenue from search advertising, but search accounted for only 21 percent of the time that U.S. visitors spent on its site during June, said Majestic Research. In contrast, 45 percent of the time was spent on Gmail, Googles beta email service.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:21 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2005

Google & Search Pulling From Offline Real Estate Ads

First Craigslist, Now Google: Newspaper Classifieds Woes Worsen from Poynter covers two research reports out that highlight how search engines -- in particular Google -- are attracting local real estate advertising money. Google said to have three regional sales teams devoted to going after real estate and classified ad money. The company's gone into pitching major real estate firms. One realtor is quoted as dumping print ads after the Google ads caused leads to shoot up. An executive summary of the Borrell report can be requested from here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:42 AM | Permalink

July 5, 2005

Survey Looks At PR Aspect Of Search Listings

Brands suffer from negative PR on Google from NetImperative looks at a survey that examines not how companies are placed in search results but how well the PR spin is for them, based on the top results. Coca Cola, for example, was found to have 4 of the 10 ten pages in a search at Google UK for on its name containing negative comments about the company.

The research was done by Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser, both of which have obvious vested interests in wanting people to consider the PR aspects of how they are listed. And I do sense some skewing going on.

In the case of Coca Cola, the white paper (PDF file) reporting the research says it's showing the top 10 results for coca cola on Google UK. However, it's really the results for coca cola uk that the illustration shows, as far as I can tell.

Go back to the coca cola search, and from what I can see, there are no negative comments about Coke showing up at all. That makes me think that results for coca cola uk were used, because they better illustrate the problem trying to be proved. And it is a problem for that particular search. But when Yahoo UK reports only 292 in May 2005 searched for "coca cola uk" on sites in its paid listings network versus nearly 8,000 who searched for "cola cola," the problem isn't as big as you might think.

Nevertheless, the PR aspects are definitely something anyone should consider -- and the white paper has a number of useful tips and advice, from what I can see with a quick skim. So check it -- and your own listings -- out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:18 PM | Permalink

June 16, 2005

Real Estate Site Traffic & Housing Bubble Terms Spike

Remember the report last week that keyword prices relating to mortgages had dropped? Well, real estate sites themselves didn't see a drop in traffic. Hitwise has posted stats today showing how visits to US real estate sites have remained strong since climbing high earlier this year. It also charted a spike last month for searches on the terms "real estate bubble" and "housing bubble." So perhaps the interest in real estate remains strong, but no one's wanted to plunk down for a mortgage as much.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:50 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2005

Survey Looks At Spend On Clothing, Personal Care Products & Electronics

Shopping.com has released a new Smart Shopping Index, a quarterly survey of online shopping behavior based on a sample of 1,000 adults in the US, 18 years and older. It gives some details on spending on clothing, consumer electronics and the fact that nearly 20 percent of us will indeed buy toothpaste and other personal care products online. Highlights:

Survey shows spending on clothing broken down by age and US region.
Nearly 1/4 purchase computer equipment and electronics online (pretty sure this is online, since the lead is is that "consumers continue to flock online."
Men are inclined to visit a retailer's web site and comparison sites before buying electronics.
15 percent of homeowners and 11 percent of renters go online to check mortgage rates.
17 percent buy personal care products online, such as soap, shampoo and toothpaste.
12 percent buy beauty products.
9 percent buy fragrances.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:39 AM | Permalink

June 10, 2005

AOL Moves TV Spend To Search; Rodney Dangerfield Of Online Advertising No More!

AOL Wooing Users to Portal, With a Little Help From Its Foes from the New York Times looks at how AOL is ironically turning to search ads on rivals Google and Yahoo to attract people to its new public portal offering. The story notes how $50 million intended for television ads is instead going to search because AOL realized search was already the biggest driver of traffic to its free music site. Here's a quote to warm the hearts of search marketers over the years who've had to scrape, lobby, beg and plead for more spending on search:

"We started seeing the results and said, 'Oh, my God, what if we took this money and put it into search engine marketing,' " Mr. Miller said. Now more than half of AOL's marketing budget for the portal will be used to pay for ads on search engines and formatting Web pages so they appear in the free search results.

So there you have it. Search, which I called the Rodney Dangerfield of no respect in terms of online advertising in 2001, gets an endorsement from Time Warner. If you're still dealing with some marketing department that remains dubious about search -- despite the continued rise in spend -- despite the fact that for a tiny, tiny amount of traditional spend they could discover the power of search themselves -- point them at this quote.

And hey, point the Penn State to it, as well. Gary noted recent research from Penn State yesterday, on how consumers are found to head primarily to organic listings. Yes, search marketers have known that for years. But to say about ads:

According to recent reports, businesses spent an estimated $8 billion to sell their products and services via sponsored links in 2004, despite little evidence that such advertising successfully directs traffic to Web sites. More likely to hook consumers are the organic results or those results returned automatically by the algorithmic operations of the search engine, Jansen said.

I bolded the key part. Little evidence advertising successfully directs traffic to web site? Please. Search is one of the most heavily measured advertising venues. Advertisers are spending because they know they are getting traffic to their web sites, and traffic that converts. The rising spend is direct evidence that it successfully drives traffic to sites. Spend wouldn't be rising otherwise.

Organic, of course, remains important. If anything, organic search is the new Rodney Dangerfield of search. Despite bringing in more traffic than paid search, advertiser spend on paid search dwarfs organic, as SEMPO stats showed last year.

But maybe organic will get more valuable. At the very least, note that AOL didn't say it would spend only on paid search. "Free" search results were deemed important, as well.

Postscript: Paid Search a Footnote in AOL.com Push from ClickZ is a brief story that organic listings will be the big push in AOL's campaign.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:52 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

New Study Looks at What Drives Online Usage?

This isn't a search item but I think it might be of interest to some of you.

The Online Publishers Association and the Media Management Center at Northwestern University have just published some results of the "Online User Experience Study." It looks at, "how people interact with and relate to digital media, and determined how each of those specific experiences impact site usage." The complete study and more details will be released at a conference that begins tomorrow.

So, just what drives online usage? Here's a list of the top 12 according to the study.

TOP USAGE DRIVERS

Entertains, absorbs me
Looks out for people like me
Regular part of my day
My personal timeout
A credible, safe place
Connects me with others
Touches me and expands my views
Makes me smarter
Turned on by ads
Easy to use
Helps and improves me
Worth saving and sharing

This news release from the OPA has more info including details about the study's methodology.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:15 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2005

Search Spend Doubles, Sends Online Retailers 43 Percent Of Their Traffic

A new Forrester/Shop.org report finds that online retailers more than doubled their search ads spend from 2003 to 2004. Of 136 retailers surveyed, they spent $877,630 on search ads in 2004, over double the $399,923 spent in 2003. Retailers also reported that search traffic made up a giant 43 percent of traffic to their web sites. More details in this press release on the study and some charts in this ClickZ article: Online Retail Growth Robust.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:36 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2005

Search Cost Per Lead Cheap Compared To Other Ads

Gold Mine Found in Web Searches from Reuters has some nice stats at the end comparing search to other forms of advertising, from a cost per lead perspective. Citing Piper Jaffray, is says the cost to acquire is $8.50 for search, $20 for yellow pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Cost for television leads were not covered.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:51 PM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Web Ousts Print Yellow Pages At Top Local Shopping Tool

A telephone survey has found that 70 percent of US households now use the internet -- and in particular search engines -- for information when shopping locally for products and services. It makes the internet tied with newspapers as the leading medium used to seek products and services locally. Conducted by the Kelsey Group and ConStat, it involved 500 respondents across the US.

What's more remarkable is that when a similar survey was conducted in October 2003, the internet ranked third at 60 percent usage, behind the top choice of print yellow pages (75 percent) and then newspapers (73 percent). Just over a year later, print yellow pages dropped to the second place spot -- and usage was down significantly, at 62 percent.

However, Neal Polachek from Kelsey highlighted to me an important point. The figures only show usage, not frequency of use. In other words, perhaps fewer use print yellow pages, but those that do could perhaps use them a lot more.

Search engines saw a marked rise. When considered separately from the internet as a whole, 55 percent said they use them for local needs, up from 47 percent when the survey was last done.

Here's a look at leading media said to be used by those over the course of a year to seek products and services in a local area:

Media Used

Oct. 2003

Feb. 2005

Point Change Newspapers

73%

70%

-3% Net: Internet Media

60%

70%

10% Printed Yellow Pages

75%

62%

-13% Search Engines

47%

55%

More details are explained in this press release about the study.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:34 AM | Permalink

February 28, 2005

Full Text: The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004

The SEMPO report: The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004, is now publicly available as a full text (PDF) document (free) here. Highlights from the report were mentioned in this December blog post. Chris also provided a detailed review in this SearchDay article.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:22 AM | Permalink

February 25, 2005

French Survey On Search Marketing Up

ZDNet France and Imitiki have posted the results of a survey on search marketing issues in France. Search Engine Marketing Survey in France has the results in English, with questions ranging from is SEO important (95% say yes), to annual budget for SEO (most don't spend anything but time), to the use of sponsored links (a huge 30 percent said they never buy these) to main paid search provider (Google with a whopping 83 percent). Survey also in French, naturellement, via here (registration appears required). Want to discuss? Check out our forum thread, Search engine marketing survey in France.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:18 PM | Permalink

February 15, 2005

On Personal Information Management

As web and other databases grow larger and the amount of non-web info (email, chat, spreadsheets, etc) in our lives continues to proliferate, managing the content in our personal storehouses of data, will become even more of a challenge. The Seattle Times article: UW ponders how to best store and retrieve electronic information, reports about the "Keeping Found Things Found" (KFTF) research project at the Information School at the University of Washington. The project's home page to plenty of excellent reading about what's going on at UW.

"There isn't yet an identified field of study called personal information management," said Harry Bruce, an associate dean for research at the Information School who organized the conference with Jones. "I would like to see this as one of the signature programs of the Information School. The momentum is building on this."

Easier said than done. Just as people have their own methods of sorting the stacks of papers in their homes or offices, computer users have different ways of tackling electronic information.

[Professor William] Jones said, studies have shown people will not use separate computer programs designed to help them stay organized; they want to use the programs they already have. Or they'll fall back on tried-and-true tools: posting sticky notes on their monitors or sending e-mail messages to themselves.

I think these comments are not only be accurate for personal information management but also for web search in general. A library professor called it the hometown syndrome. You use (in this case search) using the tools you know and changing tools and behavior is a challenge for both the individual but also for the companies who want you to try something new. If you talk to lawyers, you'll see that many are either dedicated LexisNexis or Westlaw users.

Another challenge in getting people to try different databases is the lack of standards and the thousands of different interfaces. This is why I believe invidualized, federated search appliances, will become commonplace in the future for many types of searchers. Tools to help a searcher select which database(s) will also help. Dialog, a very popular "supermarket" of databases has offered this type of tool for years.

These days there's also lots of interest in folksonomy development as seen at del.icio.us and Flickr. They're great ideas for personal and even small group info management. However, I'm still not sold on the idea for larger public services. I shared a few of the problems I see with them (for group usage) in a comment on Searchblog yesterday.

Btw, if you've never read Vannevar Bush's July 1945 article, "As We May Think" that discusses his take on "future" personal information management, have a look and read about what he calls the Memex. Fascinating.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:54 PM | Permalink

Paid Search Fastest Growing Media Channel in the UK

I came across an article on the Revolution web site, Online adspend increases by 53% in paid search boom, with some new numbers about search engine advertising in the UK.

Online advertising spend is up 52% year on year to £507m while paid-for searches have become the fastest growing media channel, according to a report by Starcom UK. The media planning and buying agency also revealed that paid-for searches on Google, Yahoo! and MSN are becoming the fastest growing media channel...Display advertising still accounts for the largest proportion of online adspend at 46%, although paid search now accounts for 32%. Classified advertising accounts for 12% and acquisition e-mails make up the final 10%.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:29 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

How Much Are Top Rankings Worth?

How much is being in the top results of a search engine worth? Wired tries but doesn't really get an monetary answer to the question in Googling the Bottom Line. Yep, we know that top rankings can generate traffic. A Oneupweb study of 30 clients done for Wired found that getting on the second or third page of the results increases traffic five times in the first month, nine times in the second. Move to page one, and it's even better -- I think.

The study says traffic will triple in the first month, then increase six times in the second. So my traffic goes up five times if I'm on the second or third page but only three times for being on the first page. Yes, that's exactly right, according to the study. Here are the figures:

Traffic Increase 1st Page 2nd/3rd Page First Month 337% 517% Second Month 627% 942%

So when the report concludes:

Oneupweb performed this study hypothesizing that being in the top 10 results is better than being in the top 30?and being below the top 30 is like being invisible. Clearly, the study establishes that trend.

The figures seemingly say the opposite. Want more traffic? Get on the second or third page of results!

That flies completely against what every search marketer knows from seeing their own stats. Fall from the top ten, and your traffic falls off as surely as gravity pulls things to earth. So I called Oneupweb to try and better understand what is going on. Here are the caveats.

First, traffic is based solely off of natural search generated referrals. They looked at how much traffic a site got from non-paid Google search results one month, then compared to the next month.

Sites coming into the second and third page of results started out with less traffic. So when they arrived, the increase was more dramatic. That's the reason Oneupweb says the 2nd/3rd page results are higher.

Specifically:

Sites entering the 2nd/3rd page started at 7 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 36 visitors per keyword.
Sites entering the 1st page started at 14 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 46 visitors.
Since the 1st page sites already started with more traffic, the gain on a percentage basis was less dramatic.

But here's another confusing aspect. The report also says:

When Oneupweb reviewed the list of sites achieving a top-10 position for a particular search term, we noted that more than 75 percent debuted there, without previous listings on Google pages 2 or 3.

and:

In keeping with the industry?s rule of thumb, Oneupweb confirmed that websites falling below page three don't sell. In our research, not one sale was recorded for a site below Google page three for the time period.

So...

More than three-quarters of the sites that hit the first page of results "debuted" there...
Which means they were originally buried below the first three pages of results where no traffic is generated...
So how did that group of sites end up having more natural search traffic to begin with than the 2nd/3rd page group?

One more thing to complicate matters. Say you were a site that debuted on the 2nd or 3rd page of results. The next month, you move to the first page (as anecdotally can often be the case). The gain you get is still recorded as part of being in the 2nd or 3rd page of results -- even though you really were on the first page.

Given that, it seems no wonder you have a nine time increase in the second months. A number of sites making the jump onto the first page of results probably fueled this.

One more excerpt from the study I had to pull out:

Oneupweb's study demonstrates a clear benefit to being listed on the first three pages of Google results and may even prompt online retailers to target Google?s first page.

I don't know anyone period, retailer or not, who doesn't already want to be on the first page of Google's results. They don't need a study to prompt them :)

Back to the Wired article. Can this traffic a make-or-break an online business? Depends on the business. If you've built your business around getting only free search traffic, yes, it can be make or break, as many found during the big Google Florida Update in late 2003. If you do a mix of paid and unpaid listings, the unpaid listings save you money -- but they probably won't break you if they go away.

For another look at page position and visibility, see the iProspect study from last year. It found:

22.6 percent of search engine users end their search after viewing the first few results returned
an additional 18.6 percent stop after reading the entire first page of results (41.2% cumulative)
25.8 percent more abandon their search after the first two pages
14.7 percent (81.7% cumulative) wait until they view three pages

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:55 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2005

Report: Paid Search Still Hot In 2005, But Growth Will Slow

MediaPost's Report: Rich Media's The New Paid Search looks at eMarketer's predictions that 2005 will see rich media overtake paid search in terms of growth. But paid search spend will still dwarf rich media, $4.7 billion predicted versus $1 billion for rich media. Paid search will make up 42 percent of the predicted online advertising spend this year.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:55 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2005

Search Advertising: Strong Growth Ahead

After a dry spell of several years, online advertising rebounded sharply in 2004, with paid search ads leading the way with a 34% increase in growth. Jupiter Research expects this growth to continue, albeit at a slower pace, through the end of the decade, with paid search solidifying its dominant role.

Today's SearchDay article, Online Ads & Search: Looking Back, Looking Forward, covers a recent Search Engine Strategies conference panel where Jupiter Research shared its findings about the paid search market. A longer version of this story for Search Engine Watch members goes into detail about the specific drivers of growth for online search ads, including demographics, searcher behavior and other factors. The longer article also details eight "things to pay attention to" that Jupiter Research believes will be crucial for successful search marketing campaigns in 2005.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:28 AM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

Search Ads Were Hot In December 2004

DoubleClick-owned Performics has provided more figures about the holiday shopping period and search, finding consumer searches were way up in December.

Based on what? Performics compared clickthrough in December 2004 to all of the third quarter of 2004. On average, daily clicks were more than double (144 percent) for December than on average through the third quarter period.

Conversion rate in December was also up, 124 percent when compared to the average of the entire period.

Average ad price per click rose 23 percent -- but as the volume of clicks greatly increased, overall ad spend in December was up more than double compared to the third quarter average.

A few more stats from this Performics press release, along with a quote saying search was good to consumers and advertisers. For information about previous releases for the holiday period, see the DoubleClick Says Black Friday Was Good For Search Marketing post.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:56 AM | Permalink

Survey: Google Still Leads, But Competitors Closing Gap

In today's SearchDay, Yahoo & MSN Closing the Google Gap, Chris Sherman looks at a new study that finds while Google is maintaining its leadership position with searchers, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves have all made significant improvements over the past year and are narrowing Google's mindshare advantage.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:39 AM | Permalink

January 7, 2005

$10 Billion From Paid Search In 2009

From MediaPost, Merrill Lynch Bullish On Paid Search, 'Neutral' On Google has Merrill Lynch predicting that paid search might generate $10 billion in 2009, up from $3.4 billion estimated last year. Google gets rated neutral given its stock is already considered "fairly valued."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:44 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2004

Keyword Celebrex More than Quadruples in Price

In just a few days the keyword Celebrex has gone from a $.95 cent term on Overture to over $4.00, according to this article from Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch.com.

Francisco adds, "...on Friday, there were no personal-injury attorneys using this keyword to advertise. On Monday, the top five advertisements came from attorneys seeking to represent potential Celebrex victims."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:24 PM | Permalink

December 15, 2004

Referrals to Shopping Sites and Popular Search Terms

Two articles out today highlighting new numbers from Hitwise

First, AuctionBytes reports about new Hitwise stats about search engine referrals to shopping and classified sites.

...the market share of all U.S. visits to Shopping and Classifieds sites reached their highest weekly levels during the week ending Dec. 11, 2004, reaching 9.73 percent. The week's level broke the prior record set Thanksgiving week 2004 at 9.72 percent. Specifically, Google contributed 4.26 percent of visits to shopping sites last week, while Yahoo! Search contributed 2.24 percent and MSN Search 0.54 percent.

Second, MediaPost has Hitwise "most popular search term" info for the week ending December 4.

Hitwise data reveals that 86.7 percent of the top 500 unique search terms for the week ending Dec. 4 were related to corporate brands such as eBay and Wal-Mart. Nearly 11 percent of the top search terms related to generic products, such as sporting goods and furniture, followed by 2.5 percent for branded products like "Nintendo DS" and "PlayStation 2."

Posted by Gary Price at 12:57 PM | Permalink

Trends in Search Engine Marketing

We know that Google and Overture are making bucket-loads of money from selling paid listings, but how much money is being spent on other types of search engine optimization and marketing? And who, exactly, controls that spending—advertisers or search marketing agencies?

Two recently released reports, one from Jupiter Research and the other from SEMPO (which Gary blogged below), offer answers to those questions, and others. The new data provides the clearest insights yet into what has traditionally been a murky area of understanding, even for people working as search industry insiders.

Today's SearchDay article, State of the Search Marketing Industry 2004, provides an overview of these two new reports. A longer version of the article for Search Engine Watch members also discusses findings showing that search marketing budgets are poaching funds from other types of advertising and covers advertiser attitudes and concerns regarding the paid listing click fraud issue.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:41 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2004

Search Term Prices Skyrocket

Kris Oser at AdAge.com (free, sub req.) looks at the rising cost of keywords in: Search Engine Ad Term Prices Skyrocket.

Because the method has proven to be such an effective marketing tool and also because record numbers of consumers are shopping online this holiday season, the price for premium search words and phrases has risen as much as 80% since last year, according to Rob Wilk, director-search engine marketing at Avenue A/Razorfish Search.

Search-related media buying agencies say that online marketers are developing the habit of increasing their search marketing budgets by up to 30% for the gift-giving season.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:43 AM | Permalink

December 9, 2004

Forrester Stats, Search Defection & Vertical Search

Charlene Li shares some stats from internal Forrester research about search loyalty in The battle for search loyalty drives innovation. Is Google facing defections? Will vertical search wipe out the big boys? Those are the suggestions, but things aren't that simple.

A key finding is that Google has a lead among consumers who regularly use its tools, but these consumers also frequently use other tools as well. The suggestion is that this leaves the door open for "defection."

Yep -- and that's always been the case. We've long had reports that consumers use multiple search services. But the classic AltaVista to Google defection example shows that defection tends to happen not just because another tool is better but also because the existing tool is bad.

In other words, my view is that it's not that MSN needs to be "good enough" to get people from Google or even "better than Google" to gain defectors. People will only kick the Google habit if they feel Google is getting worse.

If Google itself continues to be "good enough," helping consumers find what they are looking for most of the time, I don't think you'll see big defections happen. In fact, if AltaVista had continued to be "good enough," Google might never have been able to emerge as the powerhouse it is today. But AltaVista wasn't good enough -- it had gotten bad.

Notable from the report is the fact that despite the threats to Google, it continues to lead among consumers while Yahoo is said to have lost some share of searchers this year compared to last.

There's also a finding that the major search engines will "cede ground" to "search specialists." Sure, that will happen. If there's a good vertical search tool, people will learn to go to it. Heck, consider the people who already head directly Amazon to buy a book. They've learned it provides answers they need, so there's no need to search the web (My past article, Avoiding The Search Gap, looks at this type of behavior more).

So the threat is there -- but also is the reality that if a great vertical pops up, it's likely the major search engines will buy into the space or develop their own:

Yahoo recently bought FareChase to build up its travel specialty.
AOL bought Singingfish last year to have multimedia search in house (and recently relaunched the service.)
Google's Froogle shopping search engine is one of the few products the company deliberately created internally to focus on that vertical area, rather than letting it develop naturally out of engineering interests as with Google News.

Forrester's stats also found:

MSN gained users who have it as their home page and has a lead in toolbar usage, which is either pretty odd or amazing given the toolbar was only released earlier this year. Forrester also found that half of all toolbar users use another toolbar, as well.
Many loyal Google users still have Yahoo or MSN as their home pages. No doubt, this is in part because Google's stealth portal features aren't fully exposed. The general population can't have a Gmail account yet, for example -- so there's no reason for some to start out at Google as part of the daily "check my email" experience. Google still doesn't offer things like stock portfolios, as well. Google News is probably the company's most "sticky" service in terms of where people might start out.
Google was tops for "search effectiveness" but overall quality was said to be "poor," which is why consumers are said by Forrester to use multiple search engines. I really can't comment more about this apparent weakness without a lot more detail of why search effectiveness is deemed different from quality. That's not given in the summary release.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:28 AM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

Internet Publishing in the U.S.

Although not directly search-related, the U.S. Census has just released a portion of the 2002 Economic Census focusing on Internet publishing and broacasting. They might be of interest to some of you.

2002 Economic Census, Information, Industry Series, Internet Publishing and Broadcasting: 2002 [PDF]

Posted by Gary Price at 2:27 PM | Permalink

New Google Metrics on Searchblog

Searchblog has posted some new Google metrics from Majestic Research.

They include: + 98 percent of GOOG revs are from paid search. 65% of revs are domestic. + Overall US searches grew 6% quarter to quarter, Google powered searches grew by .2%.

Danny has a few comments about some of these numbers. You'll find them in the comments section below John's post. Danny's main point is the fact that their is a difference between paid search and contextual advertising. As Danny puts it, "Contextual is not search," and these numbers don't specify what is paid search and contextual.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:03 PM | Permalink

December 6, 2004

DoubleClick Says Black Friday Was Good For Search Marketing

DoubleClick has released figures relating to search marketing over the "Black Friday" post-Thanksgiving heavy shopping weekend that found traffic, conversions and spending was up among the search marketing campaigns it manages on behalf of clients.

The company compared activity among clients of its Performics subsidiary to normal daily activity. Only paid listing traffic was analyzed. Findings:

Average daily clicks nearly doubled, an increase of 85 percent.
Average cost-per-click dropped slightly, 2 percent, but total amount spent on ads was 82 percent higher, if I'm reading the press release correctly. In other words, terms were a little bit cheaper, but the amount of traffic they generated was up -- or clients were willing to let budgets go more -- or perhaps both.
Conversion rates were said to be nearly double, a 98 increase. Revenues were said to have more than tripled.
Sunday was tops in terms of traffic increase (92 percent rise and revenue (272 percent rise), but Friday had the best increase in conversion, a 259 percent rise.

My main quibbles with the figures:

Other factors could be responsible besides some consumer take-up of ads over the weekend. Performics might have a different mix of clients, better conversion techniques in place or clients may simply be willing to spend more -- though some of these differences will be slight, given the comparison to a "average" day occurs in a time period only a few months prior.
The press release talks of comparing the weekend shopping period with the "Q3 daily average" for 2004. In other words, the activity within this unique three-day shopping period in 2004 is compared to the average of activity for the entire July-September 2004 period. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison, though it does give some sense of how the weekend compares to normal daily activity. NOTE: Previously I'd written figures were compared to the Q3 average of 2003 and listed the months incorrectly as Oct-Dec. 2003.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:31 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2004

Snap Stats: Seeing What's Up With Snap.com

Via John Battelle, news of a nice nice write-up from SiliconBeat looking at the data Snap is freely providing about its operations, such as daily earnings, number of enrolled advertisers, ads generating clicks per day and other information.

Any worries that too much information is being given out? Nope, said founder Bill Gross, in the story Snap: the future of transparency?

You can see Snap's data directly via the its stats home page. Charts show number of advertisers, paid click, daily searches and more.

Drilling down via the financial stats page, I see that November has been the best month for the company, earning it $1,631.68. That's above the $1,176.40 in October, the only other month revenues have been earned.

Via the advertiser stats page, LookSmart is revealed to be the company's top advertiser in the last 30 days, spending $1,303 with Snap, dwarfing the next highest advertiser of Smarter.com at $90.

A traffic stats page shows that Top20.com just edges out Google as the site's top referring source. Both generated on the order of 50,000 referrals over the last seven days.

And yes, there is a keywords stats page, with "location" as the odd top query for the last seven days, followed by "book summary."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:23 PM | Permalink

November 2, 2004

Most Search Marketers Unsophisticated

Another bit of catch-up from last week, news of a report from JupiterResearch that finds search marketers still have a lot of maturing to do. MediaPost provides a write-up here: Report: Three out of Four Search Marketers 'Unsophisticated'.

Unsophisticated? Wipe that image from your mind of search marketers who sit with their elbows on the table, food crumbs around their mouths and use the wrong salad fork.

Instead, "sophisticates" are search marketers that are somehow managing bids or tracking traffic from paid and unpaid listings. "Unsophisticates" are those who undertake search marketing activity without gather such feedback.

Of 538 search marketers surveyed, only 25 percent were considered sophisticates. Factors that seem to push people into sophistication are more experience with search advertising, bigger budgets and the type of advertiser (direct marketer versus brand marketer) that you are.

I've done my own write-up of the report for our Search Engine Watch members, highlighting some other interesting details and differences, between the two groups. You'll find that here: The Sophisticated Search Marketer.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread on the topic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 5, 2004

SEMPO Search Marketing Survey Opened

Last week, I complained that little is known about the size of the search marketing industry. Paid search spending, sure -- we've got some sense there. But money being spent directly with search marketing companies themselves, on both paid and natural listings? Who knows?

I also mentioned that one bright spot was planned research by SEMPO to survey the market. Now that survey's begun. Anyone is able to participate using the form now posted here: SEMPO Research Survey.

Results are planned for release later this year. More details on the survey can be found in this press release: SEMPO Launches Survey on the Size and Impact of Current SEM Activities and Spending.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

More On Mixing Contextual & Search Spending

Niki Scevak saw my Google's Revenue Is Not All Search-Derived post yesterday decrying the mixture of contextual and search revenues and points out that Jupiter Research's own paid search estimates appropriately don't mix the two: The Myths of Contextual Advertising.

He goes on to discuss how AdSense doesn't just mean contextual at Google any more. Instead, it's an umbrella term they now use to represent both "AdSense for search" and AdSense for content."

This came up on our forums earlier this month: AdSense for search? As I explained there, Google shifted to using the umbrella term internally a few months ago. You really saw it make its public debut in the Google IPO filing, when AdSense was used throughout those documents to represent any type of ads placed outside of Google.

Advertisers, of course, tend to think of two different things: AdWords (meaning ads that show up in response to keyword searches) and AdSense (meaning to advertisers the ads that show up contextually placed and which are considered by many of them as an option they can choose for their AdWords campaigns).

From Google's point of view, AdWords is simply the program that lets advertisers place ads into the AdSense program -- which means both AdSense for search and AdSense for content.

Niki goes on to outline that contextual ads are in his view a dismal earner for Google but one it can afford because they represent incremental income for the service, rather than its bread-and-butter. Don't forget, the deals also have the impact of denying Google competitors from gaining partnerships, denying them cash). He also notes Google is stepping back from some "vanity" deals which may have even cost it money.

Meanwhile, Kevin Ryan takes another look at those IAB search projection figures I blogged about earlier, the ones where contextual doesn't appear to be broken out. In his Why Search is Slowing, Ryan gathers a few comments about the fears of a slowdown in search, despite still incredible rises. In short, some leveling off was in order.

He also notes that keyword search emerged as an ad format in 2002. To be correct, the ad format was there well before this. It was just that no one bothered to track it.

Spending on paid search ads began with Overture back in 1998. It happened even earlier than that, if you want to count keyword-linked banners. Google started carrying paid ads at the end of 1999.

All this spending could have been tracked back then. It wasn't. It took the rosy public financials of Overture to wake up Wall Street, research firms and even advertising organizations to something advertisers were already doing: spending on search in droves. My Search Engine Marketing Finally Getting Respect article from 2001 looks at this more.

Meanwhile, tracking of spending on "free" or "organic" or "natural" search seems non-existent. That's something that research by SEMPO may help correct. It's long overdue. Not having these figures is like trying to predict the state of any type of marketing solely on ad buys but not public relations efforts.

Postscript: The IAB figures do apparently track spending on search engine optimization as well as advertising.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

NetRatings Provides Vertical Search Breakdown

NetRatings has come out with a new "MegaView Search" service designed to let the ratings company better report search behavior. As part of the new data, NetRatings reports (via PDF press release) that search activity in July 2004 broke down like this:

Web Search: 99 percent
Local Search: 24 percent
Shopping Search: 18 percent
Image Search: 10 percent
News Search: 6 percent

Why don't the figures add up to 100 percent? Because the same person might do different searches. So of 107 million searchers tracked in July, virtually all of them did a web search at some point in the month, then 24 percent of them did a search classified as local, 18 percent a shopping search and so on.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Spending Continues To Rise -- But Contextual Is Lumped In

In the second quarter of this year, paid search advertising was nearly $1 billion -- a 29 percent rise from the same period as a year ago. It also makes up 40 percent of all online ad spending. This is according to new figures from the Interactive Advertising Burean and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

However, I'm fairly positive that contextual ads -- which are NOT search advertising -- are nonetheless lumped into these figures. That's because I don't see a separate category for contextual. If this is the case, then the figures are misleading. They give no idea what's really fueling the rise -- more spending on search, more spending on contextual or what???

More details from MediaPost here: Search Expands Role As Online's Ad Engine. And Gary tells me when the actual report is out for the public, you should be able to find it here.

Want to comment or read discussion of this topic? Please visit this thread in our forums: Online Advertising Coming Back: Search Surging.

Postscript: The report is now available. The definitions DO include contextual ads as "contextual search" and part of search spending. That's bad. On the upside, spending on "site optimization" IS included, so the figures aren't purely on the advertising side of things.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 15, 2004

Web Search in the Hispanic Community

Polling Hispanic Search Users Source: Media Post A good overview of the Hispanic search market. Lots of numbers. iHispanic Marketing Group president Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez Jr. is quoted throughout the article. Nacho is also moderates the SEW Multilingual Search Markets & Non-US Engines forum.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 31, 2004

Survey Says: SEM Could Be Better

Search engine marketing firm OneUpWeb found only 10 percent of Fortune 100 web sites to be considered well optimized. Write-up here from Internet Retailer: Less than 10% of Fortune 100 use search engine optimization effectively

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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