This week I had the pleasure of moderating and speaking at SES Chicago. It was probably my favorite Chicago show yet. What a change from last year when everyone was nervous about how deep the economy would slide into chaos.
One subject that did create some buzz - no surprise - was Google’s announcement of an always-on personalized search. There’s been lots written about it, and the change truly is spectacular. Unfortunately, spectacular doesn’t always equate good.
Rather than dwell on all the questionable issues that the always-on personalized search system raises, I’m going to comment about something that’s actually good in this update: The death of the ranking report. Finally! Finally, rankings are totally meaningless as a reporting metric. Ranking reports which scrape results to identify a position in the search results have been deceptive for years, but now they are unquestionably and completely useless. Anyone providing a ranking report as authoritative is deceiving their clients.
In a way, I am thrilled with Google’s personalization changes, as they make the performance reporting used in Enquisite Optimizer even more valuable. It now is definitely the only real way to measure true page and rank positioning. Optimizer shows where people located anywhere in the world are finding your site in the results, based on actual click-through activity, not some bogus ranking report. This is only analytical platform which report back to you on what your customers are actually seeing in the search results.
People who use traditional ranking reports as a reporting metric are no longer able to report any meaningful data. First off, the data collected are unique to that computer. Second, other activity from that computer affects the results. Run just one site’s reports from a system? Do anything else with it? Anything you search for with that computer can now affect the results you’re seeing. Wait until Caffeine rolls out, and anything you do with that computer will cause variations. Use Google Docs, Gmail, or any other Google products? Your results will vary.
So how can any ranking report based on what one, or even 100 computers which repeatedly run ranking analysis reports be accurate? They can’t. The ranking report you used to use as a metric is dead.
If, as a user, you’re not comfortable with the new personalized search “benefit” just wait for caffeine to roll-out in full next year. Me? I’ve already changed my default search engine in Firefox to Bing. Strange, I’m not concerned about how responsibly Microsoft will handle my information.
Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Ranking Reports, Search Analytics, Search Engines, Search Metrics, bing, search analytics
Yesterday I published data around click through rates from the search results. That data shows that 95% of all search referrals now arrive from page 1 in the search results. The number is higher in paid, and slightly lower in organic search, but 5% for everything not on page 1 doesn’t leave a lot of room for any other positioning.
I thought it would be interesting to start comparing that data against quality of visit, from the perspective of engagement. A longer time on site and / or more pages viewed should give a good indication of engagement. What I found was quite surprising. You would think that a searcher who is going to bother to drill deeper into the search results would be more motivated to find the right information, and thus would stay engaged in a destination site longer. In fact, the opposite is true. As people drill deeper into the results they become less patient.
The information shown demonstrates how there is a relationship between where in the search results people click, and the quality of their visit to your business. In this case longer time on site and more pages viewed would indicate a better quality of visitor. Counter-intuitively, it’s not the people who drill deeper in the search results that are showing the greatest satisfaction when they land on a destination site, it’s the visitors from page one:
| Referrals from Page # |
Pages Viewed |
Time on Site |
| |
(average) |
mm:ss: |
| 1 |
3.59 |
2:27 |
| 2 |
2.16 |
1:06 |
| 3 |
2.12 |
1:01 |
| 4 |
2.08 |
0:57 |
| 5 |
2.05 |
0:55 |
What this data demonstrates is that visitors from page one in the SERPs are, on average, spending twice as much time and viewing almost twice as many pages on the web sites they visit as visitors who arrive from clicking deeper within the results pages.
Not only is page one more valuable from the perspective of amount of traffic, but also quality. When viewed graphically, the similarity between pages viewed and time on site is stunning, both in relation to time on site v. the referring page number in the search results:
As well as to pages viewed v. the referring page number in the search results:
This less patient user behavior is also reflected in how people search using longer and longer queries. I published data a few weeks ago around how many words are in a typical referring query. What I found was while people might start searching with one word queries, they quickly move to longer, more specific requests. In the next few weeks I’ll expand on that post with some page view and time on site behavioral metrics as well.
As always, Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, and reflects click-through activity data.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Analytics, Search Engines, Search Metrics
Greetings from Search Engine Strategies Berlin!
This week, our weekly trend data of search engine market share as defined by click-through activity shows a Bing regaining its forward momentum, after a slight slip last week. However, looking at the last four weeks, it seems that Bing is hovering quite steadily around the 7.7% market share mark. Over the next few weeks we should be able to see if this is maintained as a normal position, or if Bing recovers its forward momentum.
It should be interesting to observe what happens this week. Each year we see a big drop in search referral traffic associated with the week of the American Thanksgiving Holiday. Will all the engines drop the same proportionate amount, or will Google’s traditional strength in the IT and student marketplace result in a larger drop in market share for the week? Next week I’ll try and put together a chart showing how search volume drops in the run-up to the Holiday, and also how it bounces back.
As always, we’re providing the data in weekly breakdowns to try and identify trends in very granular ways. This data reflects actual clickthrough activity, and not the number of queries run. Meaning if someone performs a search on Yahoo, but doesn’t click through to the results, we don’t track it. We only track searches which generated referrals.
The raw data for those who prefer the numbers, not the graphics:
|
Google |
Yahoo |
Bing |
Other |
| September 7 |
78.68% |
11.51% |
6.80% |
3.01% |
| September 14 |
78.35% |
11.13% |
6.50% |
4.02% |
| September 21 |
77.43% |
11.35% |
7.11% |
4.11% |
| September 28 |
77.65% |
10.80% |
7.27% |
4.28% |
| October 4 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.23% |
4.33% |
| October 12 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.21% |
4.35% |
| October 18 |
77.89% |
10.65% |
7.29% |
4.17% |
| October 25 |
77.83% |
10.56% |
7.56% |
4.05% |
| November 1 |
77.75% |
10.46% |
7.66% |
4.12% |
| November 8 |
77.96% |
10.21% |
7.75% |
4.08% |
| November 15 |
77.60% |
10.39% |
7.59% |
4.42% |
| November 22 |
77.59% |
10.41% |
7.67% |
4.37% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Market Share, Search Engines, Search Metrics, Yahoo, bing
In honor of Pubcon Las Vegas, where I’ll be heading tomorrow, I’m going to post some more data which should provide meaningful insights to search marketers. First up this week is an answer to the question lots of advanced search marketers often ask me: “how long are most search queries?”, or in other words, “How many words are in most search queries?” I had one of our databases prepare a report on search query length for the month of October, so a poll size of ~40 million search referrals, so enough to be more than just statistically relevant.
Interestingly, four-word queries are more common than one-word queries, and five-word ones are almost as common! Five words!
The database pool used was general web search, and not skewed towards local search, so this breakdown is even more surprising. If it had been local skewed, then a preponderance of local queries such as “Best burritos in San Francisco” would explain the query length.
For the longest query, we actually recorded one search referral with 594 “keywords” in it. Likely it was someone was searching for exact copies of an article, either to identify plagiarism, or link opportunities.
So, if this is “normal” for the Internet, how does your site match up? Interesting to think of this as one more way to determine if your web site’s SEO strategy is healthy: distribution of query length. Not really longtail, what animal shape could we name this metric after? Dana Todd is great at naming these things; maybe I’ll ask her. :-)
For those of you wanting the raw data - I didn’t have time to format the tables, so just put it at the end…
| Words in Query |
Percentage of Queries |
| 1 |
11.08% |
| 2 |
24.56% |
| 3 |
25.77% |
| 4 |
17.68% |
| 5 |
10.03% |
6 |
5.36% |
7 |
2.65% |
8 |
1.36% |
9 |
0.70% |
10 |
0.37% |
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Analytics, Search Engines, Search Metrics, search analytics
Last week I published information about how the market shares for the search engines have evolved over the last few months. I’m going to attempt to post updates almost every week, offset randomly by other interesting trends such as browser share numbers. This week, I’ve put together a weekly update, as quite a few people emailed me about the evolving trends.
To highlight the trend, I’ll re-post the data from early September.
search engine market shares for search engine usage based on searchers located in the US
|
Google |
Yahoo |
Bing |
Others |
September 7 |
78.68% |
11.51% |
6.80% |
4.06% |
| September 14 |
78.35% |
11.13% |
6.50% |
4.02% |
| September 21 |
77.43% |
11.35% |
7.11% |
4.12% |
| September 28 |
77.65% |
10.80% |
7.27% |
4.28% |
| October 4 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.23% |
4.25% |
| October 12 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.21% |
4.36% |
| October 18 |
77.89% |
10.65% |
7.29% |
4.16% |
Again, this data represents search engine click through activity where the people initiating the searches are located in the U.S. At some point I’ll present information on global search activity.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, MSN, Market Share, Search Engines, Search Metrics, Yahoo, bing
