Archive for the 'Industry Stats' Category

Below is some “Google Internal” data. About a year and a half ago, I asked one of my Google reps if she had Average CTR’s by Industry for Google Only. I was going thru some old files, and I found this ppt slide. It doesn’t tell me what companies were used in the accessment, and whether or not the PPC Keywords were more brand-related than generic keywords. Obviously, brand-related keywords would skew the results with higher CTR’s.

In a previous post, I discussed Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads. For example, things like position, keywords, ad copy, dynamic keyword insertion, etc. have an impact on CTR.

Campaign objectives make a difference. It depends on each advertiser’s campaign objectives. If they are Conversion-Oriented, then their Clickthrough Rates are most likely lower. Because, those are the advertisers that can have their ad in Position #7 and that’s their sweet spot for conversion rates.

As opposed to the Brand-Oriented campaign. In which case, findability is crucial to their campaign success. That means a Position-based success metric. Hence, higher CTR’s. Some of these brand campaigns use CTR as an Analytic Metric, so their is a heavy emphasis on optimizing CTR.

I was told that these are from large comprehensive PPC campaigns from industry leaders. I don’t think this can really be used as representative data for the Avg CTR for each of these industries. But, it’s interesting data anyway.

Traditional search engines have at their core three components. First the crawl ( or spider) which gathers every possible page on the web. Second is the Index, the massive database created by that crawl. And, the third comprises the user interface, which take the index and make it available in an intelligent fashion to the end user.

Early search engines lacked sematic abilities. They didn’t index the full document…just the document’s Title. Then, out came WebCrawler which ranked results according to the most references (or links), and indexed the full text of the document.

Digital Equipment Corp. developed AltaVista to show how their hardware could hold huge databases ( the entire internet). Yahoo was a directory, not textual search. Excite and Lycos competed for a piece of the search landscape. Most of the traffic came to these 1st generation search engines by making deals to having their link/results on a competitors/Portal homepage. Initially, portals and web directories were the big thing. A search engine was just part of the portal.

When Page & Brin developed Google (in the year 1999) , it was the most sophisticated and relevant natural results on the web. Although, they were desperate to generate revenue. They vehemently disliked the idea of placing banners on the homepage, or selling any kind of advertising that could be thought of skewing the organic results. Hence, they were desperate for funding as their seed money was rapidly dwindling.

Goto (Overture) started out as a commercial search engine only. Pay-per-click only. And they became the defacto paid results for Yahoo and MSN Search. Bruce Clay has a great Search Engine Relationship chart that has this illustrated, and has evolved throughout the years as the Search industry has evolved.

GOTO was very profitable, and able to scale rapidly. Google was scrambling for a revenue generating idea, and out sprang AdWords ( in the year 2000). Basically, they just copied GOTO, and made a new & improved version of GOTO. Adwords was “self-serve”. If an advertiser had a credit card, and 5 minutes, they could be on the search results pages. It caught on like wildfire. The rest is history.

In March 2001, Walt Mossberg of WSJ announnced Google is the best search engine. It was an authority endorsement for Google. Google had built a better and more relevant search engine than everyone else’s.

Google became the SE that powered organic search for AOL and Ask Jeeves. They got a deal to power the backend for Yahoo as the natural results. With a clickable icon that said, “Powered by Google”. The Google icon was on Netscape. Google was generating a high amount of searches. The early growth was grass roots. No tradeshows. No advertisements. No PR.

The big deals are still happening…
News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media and Google announced on Aug, 7, 2006 a multi-year search technology and services agreement whereby Google will be the exclusive search and keyword targeted advertising sales provider for Fox Interactive Media’s growing network of web properties including MySpace.com.

Google knows how to continue to build their product offering by organizing their engineers into small, agile product development teams that have cranked out plenty for us to increase our productivity.

As we all know, Google is now the 900 pound gorilla:

As Internet Marketers we need to evaluate all types of emerging media and use it (if it makes sense) to drive traffic, links, brand awareness, etc.

So, here are a couple of industry research charts that demonstrate the potential power of a Social Media Campaign:

Notice Digg is on the list at #28.

Research conducted by Atlas Solutions studied the impact of search engine rank to conversion rates. The study consisted of 41,460,000 clicks, 408,000 keywords, and thousands of ads across multiple industry segments that produced an industry agnostic study relevant across all industry segments.

The research focused on answering this question: How does the change of rank of a Paid Search ad, affect the conversion rate for that ad?

General finding regarding High volume vs. Low volume Search Ads / Keywords:
- Conversion rates for keywords generally fall when rank is lowered. This is mostly caused by the decrease in click potential for a lower ranked search ad. However, the study concluded that conversion rates for low volume keywords may actually increase at lower ranks.

Key takeaways from the study:
1) Advertisers must do a balancing act between efficiency and volume. Just by getting the best possible ROAS at rank #10, an advertiser could be missing out on a much higher volume of conversions if they increased the ad to a slightly higher rank. By decreasing rank, an advertiser saves on the CPC. However, that most likely will cause a reduction in site traffic. Thus, lowering CPC’s could do more damage than good by potentially lowering the conversion rates.

2) It has been found that conversion rates typically drop by rank. So, if the cost per click is a very small difference between rank, it probably makes sense to raise the bid to gain a higher rank, which corresponds to a higher conversion rate.

3) Conversion rates for low volume keywords have been shown to increase as rank is lowered. This is an opportunity to squeak out more efficiency and lower the total cost of the SEM campaign

The Atlas Solutions study is a useful benchmarking guide that provides a deeper understanding on how rank affects conversions. By continually testing & measuring, advertisers will discover the most cost efficient way to drive traffic & sales from their search campaigns.

This type of information is very useful when allocating budgets, search engine selection, and the targeting components within your Search Engine Marketing plan.

Forrester Research ( subscription required) analyzed data from almost 47,000 US households. Some findings: Mass-affluent 25- to 39-year-olds prefer Google, and affluent 70+ year-olds are the most frequent AOL visitors.

To determine affuence segments, Forrester examined consumer’s investable assets — excluding any assets held in retirement accounts. Using this information, they divided consumers into three segments: Mainstream (less than $100,000), mass-affluent ($100,000 to $1 million), and affluent (more than $1 million).

Excerpt from study:

25- to 39-year-olds prefer Google, not AOL. Mass-affluent 25- to 39-year-olds are more likely to visit Google (20% above the average for Google across all segments), MSN (17% above the MSN average), and Yahoo! (16% above the Yahoo average) than other search portals. This group of young mass-affluent consumers also turns out to be the segment least avid about AOL (20% below the AOL average).

40- to 54-year-olds prefer Netscape. Mass-affluent 40- to 54-year-old consumers are significantly more likely to visit Netscape (25% above the Netscape average across all segments) and Google (16% above the Google average).

55- to 69-year-olds prefer Netscape, not MSN. The percentage of mass-affluent 55- to 69-year-olds who visit Netscape is 50% higher than the Netscape average across all segments. At the other end of the spectrum, the portion of this group that visits MSN is 19% below the MSN average across all segments.

70+ year-olds prefer AOL but none of the others. Mass-affluent 70+ year-olds only visit one portal at an above-average rate: AOL (19% above the AOL average). This older segment has a significantly below-average percentage of consumers visiting the other sites — bottoming out with MSN (52% below the MSN average).

Here is the breakdown in more detail:

Pharmaceutical companies must analyze the many ways to be successful online—integrating their online marketing tactics with their overall brand strategies.

According to data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 45% of American adults, or 91 million Americans, regularly consume prescription drugs. The study also found that 64% of American households have at least one person who uses prescription drugs.

Manhattan Research estimates that as many as 45.7 million Americans go online to search for information about pharmaceutical products in particular, while other industry observers estimate that millions more Americans use the Internet to look for health information in general, either for themselves, or on behalf of friends or family members.

Not surprisingly, as a result of this growing Internet audience, pharmaceutical companies are moving more of their marketing attention and advertising dollars online—but the shift has only begun.

Source: eMarketer

BIGresearch conducted a recent survey that shows that Yahoo! is the overall #1 search engine choice for purchase decisions and Google is number 4.

Influence of Internet Advertising on Purchase Decisions (Ranked by Search Engine Preference):
Electronics
1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. MSN
4. AOL
5. Ask Jeeves

Apparel/Clothing
1. Yahoo!
2. AOL
3. MSN
4. Google
5. Ask Jeeves

Car/Truck
1. MSN
2. Yahoo!
3. Google
4. Ask Jeeves
5. AOL

Grocery
1. AOL
2. Yahoo!
3. Ask Jeeves
4. MSN
5. Google

Source: BIGresearch, February 2006 and Center For Media Research

Conclusion: Marketers must not just look at market share, as having the most impact on their ROI, but need to analyze reports like these to discover which search engines have the most influence on buying decisions.