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.
|
2007-04 |
2007-05 |
2007-06 |
2007-07 |
2007-08 |
2007-09 |
|
Page 1
|
85.50% |
86.03% |
87.18% |
87.79% |
88.07% |
88.40% |
|
Page 2
|
7.61% |
7.52% |
6.90% |
6.52% |
6.47% |
6.44% |
|
Page 3
|
2.84% |
2.71% |
2.48% |
2.35% |
2.28% |
2.21% |
|
Page 4
|
1.30% |
1.19% |
1.09% |
1.04% |
1.00% |
0.92% |
|
Page 5
|
0.82% |
0.75% |
0.69% |
0.66% |
0.64% |
0.58% |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2007-10 |
2007-11 |
2007-12 |
2008-01 |
2008-02 |
2008-03 |
|
Page 1
|
88.42% |
88.47% |
88.81% |
88.90% |
88.78% |
89.71% |
|
Page 2
|
6.47% |
6.44% |
6.23% |
6.19% |
6.39% |
5.93% |
|
Page 3
|
2.20% |
2.16% |
2.05% |
2.06% |
2.04% |
1.85% |
|
Page 4
|
0.92% |
0.91% |
0.89% |
0.88% |
0.87% |
0.78% |
|
Page 5
|
0.57% |
0.57% |
0.55% |
0.55% |
0.54% |
0.46% |
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
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
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
No Comments since March 15th, 2008
I’m off to SES New York this evening. No, I don’t particularly enjoy red-eye flights.
On Monday at SES, I’ll be speaking on the Click Fraud and Click Auditing panel. Jeff Rohrs, Shuman Ghosemajumber, Tom Cuthbert and myself are the only carry-overs from the Click Fraud panels at SES Chicago last December. As Tom didn’t have a powerpoint last time, I look forward to him bringing forward some new data. I’ve got an entirely new presentation, with perhaps only one holdover graphic. I hope those of you who will be there will enjoy it!
Two weeks ago, Shuman and I had lunch at the Googleplex. We discussed a lot of things, and I only realize now that one thing we didn’t discuss was this panel at SES NY, other than to say “see you there.”
On Wednesday, I’m also moderating a late session on Searcher Behavior. I’m looking forward to moderating this particular session as I’ve spoken on it a few times, and the change from speaker to moderator on this topic should be interesting.
If you’re at SES New York, please do say hello, come check out the sessions, and ask lots of questions.
Posted under Analytics, Click Fraud, Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Search Engines, Yahoo
No Comments since March 11th, 2008
I haven’t made a Search Statistics update in a while. No excuses. Just haven’t. I’m going to rectify that now, and I’ll put up some more numbers later today or tomorrow.
With all the uncertainty around Ask, and a lot of people discussing how it’s looking like it’s dropping out of the race, I thought I should should post some numbers which reflect what we’re seeing for their share of the search marketplace over the last year and a bit. We used data representing more than 250 Million search referrals since Jan 1 2007.
2007-01 2.50%
2007-02 2.99%
2007-03 1.74%
2007-04 1.68%
2007-05 1.67%
2007-06 1.26%
2007-07 1.02%
2007-08 0.94%
2007-09 1.15%
2007-10 1.23%
2007-11 1.17%
2007-12 1.19%
2008-01 1.25%
2008-02 1.03%
2008-03 0.90%
If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
Posted under Analytics, Ask, Enquisite Search Metrics, Ranking Reports, Search Engines, Search Metrics, Yahoo, market share
