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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 (1)

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 (8)

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 (1)

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 (0)

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 (1)

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 Eric Enge 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 Deborah Richman 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 Eric Enge 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 Eric Enge 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 Deborah Richman 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 Deborah Richman 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 Eric Enge 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 Deborah Richman 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 Deborah Richman 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 are