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Google’s Chrome Market Share

No Comments since September 5th, 2008

I’ve seen all sorts of posts immediately after Google’s Chrome was released. Some were reviews, some discussions of strategy, and some were more or less “how many people will use it?” type posts or discussions.

Yesterday I was seated in a meeting with a company which makes a different browser, and wondered what impact it was really having.

In reading other reviews, the one thought that kept nagging at me was all these posts drew from technology sites’ data. Of course that would be skewed. The early adopters will be bleeding edge techies. We try everything! (note: I use a Mac, and can’t try Chrome).

The luxury of being part of Enquisite is I can actually look up the real numbers! We collect data on tens of millions of web events per day, drawn from thousands of web sites. So, I thought I would share what we are seeing.

For early next month, I’ll try and post some browser share data using a larger sampling of data. But for now, I thought for now I’d post data from four non-technology skewed, general consumer oriented sites, and break it out on a daily basis:

Note: 31st was a Sunday, Labor Day was the 1st.

Remember: Data is only from 4 (four) sites out of +5,000 in our DB, but they represent general consumer oriented sites, and thus are not technologically skewed.

I’ll attempt to do a full analysis early next month, and show who the Chrome marketshare is pulling from. IE? Firefox? (not Safari yet!)

Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics

Speaking at SES San Jose

No Comments since July 22nd, 2008

Search Engine Strategies San Jose is always one of the largest and most intense of the dozens of search marketing conferences I attend each year. SES San Jose 2008 opens a month from now, and this year, I’ll be serving as a panelist on two sessions and the moderator of two others.

The first panel I am participating in follows the keynote address on Tuesday August 19. I am moderating the Measuring Success in a 2.0 World session starting at 11:00am. The panel is part one of Tuesday’s three-session series addressing search analytics as part of the Measuring Success Track.

This should be an especially interesting session because of the quality of the speakers. The four other panelists are people I’ve developed deep respect for over the years. Jim Sterne is the chairman of the Web Analytics Association. Matt Bailey is president of SiteLogic and one of the best speakers in SEO. Avinash Kaushik is an analytics evangelist at Google, and Marshall Sponder is a Sr. Web Analyst with Monster.com. Moderating this session will be challenging and the questions and answers session towards the end will probably be intense.

The next day, Wednesday August 20, I am participating in two more panels. The first session I present at on Wednesday is the Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud panel which is part of the Advanced Advertising Track. This is an important session that runs at most Search Engine Strategies conferences. For marketers running pay-per-click campaigns (and isn’t that all of them?) this session will give important tips on how to review your paid search traffic, how to spot abnormalities and anomalies in your click streams, and how to deal with click quality concerns.

Much later on the 20th, at 4:15pm, I will be moderating the Advanced Paid Search Techniques panel-and I’ll have to remind myself that moderators are there to make sure the discussion flows smoothly, not to make their own ideas front-and-center–as I have plenty of opinions on this particular subject. Luckily, our panelists do too; they include Jon Myers from MediaVest, Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance, Thomas Bindl from Refined Labs GmbH, and Andy Atkins-Kruger of WebCertain Europe Ltd.

The fourth panel I am participating on is the Best Kept Secrets to Search session on Thursday August 21. Made up of SEM old-timers, this panel is billed as a “…no holds barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks and secrets.” There’s certain to be a lot of lively discussion during this session!

I’m looking forward participating in these sessions-and attending many others-at SES San Jose. Hope to see you there!

Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics

Search Engine Referral Rates by Page in SERPs

6 Comments since May 22nd, 2008

I’ve been asked a lot of questions over the last 10 years about how deep in the search results do people actually go before they clicked through on a result. In the past I’ve run a few reports on this information, but using only a month or two worth of data.

I just ran another report, but instead of two months, I used a sampling of our data representing ~300MM search referrals pulled from a much longer time period. What I found was the percentage of traffic from page one is actually increasing over time

I didn’t segregate out PPC or image searches, so this data does represent referrals in the aggregate. When we look at the hard numbers behind the data, the growing gap between page 1 and the rest is stunning.

It’s stunningly obvious that Page 1 generates the vast majority of traffic. Everyone knows this intuitively, but this data provides the facts to substantiate it. Page 2 still gets some traffic, but it’s negligible by comparison. While not appearing to hold much value, these placements are not entirely worthless.

Although a Web page which is found on Page 2 or lower on search engine result pages, (SERPs) may not get much traffic, you want to make these pages some of the prime targets in your SEO campaign. Although people aren’t finding these pages as often, they have incredibly high value simply because the search engines are finding and placing them, just a few small steps away from the success of page one.

Consider it from the opposite perspective: 90 percent of search engine users never venture beyond the first page of results. Listings found on page 2 of the SERPs are incredibly valuable, just not quite valuable enough to make it to page 1. These pages are your gems in the rough, and should be thought of as home-runs in waiting. With a little work, they can easily place on the first page, and you can hit it out of the park on an SEO campaign, just by concentrating your efforts in the right places.

Find the pages where you’re achieving page 2 or 3 placements, and focus on optimizing and improving the pages found there. Small adjustments can bump you up onto page 1, and will make your traffic soar. Get more pages moving up in the listings, and the effect on other pages in your Website is cumulative.

Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Engines, Search Metrics, market share

Enquisite Pro Now Available

No Comments since March 17th, 2008

I’m happy to announce that Enquisite Pro is now available to all Enquisite users.

You’ll see lots of great changes and updates. Tons of new features, enhancements, and additions, including of course the Long Tail reports, completely flexible date ranges, custom reporting (build and save your favorites), the ability to group terms, or engines, and an advanced comparison report.

We’ve spent a lot of time building or rather re-building from the foundation up. We’ve got the most accurate web based logging system available, and the fastest one too. We engineered for scale, and built based on your feedback and requests.

We’ve got a lot more to come, but it’s already superb, so let’s start here.

Just log in as usual, and enjoy.

We will be migrating to a paid version; but we’re still going to keep portions free. It’s a commitment we made. In the new reports the first two tabs are going to remain free. They’re your summary reports, and your trends over time. We’ve enhanced them substantially from the Enquisite Beta, so you’re getting more information than ever in these free portions. Features like the Long Tail and advance comparison tools will be paid features, but you’re getting them free for a few weeks. Try them out, tell us how you like them, and what else you’d like to see. We’re building a lot more cool elements in, and completely new reports, but we can only build the features we know people will want…

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Richard Zwicky

Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Ranking Reports, Search Engines, Search Metrics, market share

Search Engine Market Shares 2007

1 Comment since March 16th, 2008

So I arrived at Search Engine Strategies New York today, and I was asked by a couple of people about search engine market shares. After pulling out the Ask numbers last week, I had all the data ready to go for the other engines. Remember, this data reflects the search referral data we’re seeing across the entire network of sites that Enquisite is tracking, so thousands of sites’ data contributed to these numbers. When I actually graphed the data, it looked quite interesting.

I had to break the data into two parts. In this first graph we see Yahoo have its customary summer spike, which generally seems to relate to the end of school. During the summer months students spend less time online, but when they go online it’s to fetch mail and the like. During this period, Yahoo! generally goes up in market share, as most students appear to use Yahoo Mail. Normally, we also see Google drop during this period.

What’s interesting is that MSN is slowly but surely gaining traction, and moving up. It’s gone from 2.9% in January 2007 to just over 5% at the end of January 2008. Still small, but almost 100% growth, and anyone in business know’s 100% growth does matter.

Meanwhile however, Yahoo’s actually losing market share, and at a greater rate than MSN’s growing.

Now take a look at what happens when we add Google to the mix.

Google’s actually over 80% of all search referral traffic we’re seeing across our network of sites. In fact, the data I’m looking at for March has Google reaching 83% of all search referrals we’re seeing. This data is culled from well over 250 million referrals in the last year.

So, is search getting more competitive? Not really. Is Microsoft buying Yahoo going to make much of a dent in Google’s lead? Nope. But (as Rand pointed out) if you look at their combined reach in the display ad business that’s a different matter.

Posted under Analytics, Ask, Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, MSN, Search Engines, Search Metrics, Yahoo, market share