Archive for the ‘Market Share’ Category
Search Engine Market Share Update, November 10, 2009
As noted previously, we’re trying and produce weekly and monthly breakdowns of certain search engine related market trend numbers. I posted a breakdown of search referral query length earlier, but I wanted to make sure I updated the search engine referral data as well. 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 data shows a continued growth trend on the part of Bing, with Microsoft (MSFT) gaining almost a full point of market share over the last two months. Yahoo’s share of search referrals continues to erode.
For those who like the raw data / numbers, here you go:
| 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% |
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.
Browser Market Share Update – Oct 2009
Ongoing trends continue to bear out in the browser share numbers. It will be interesting to observe what happens in November and December with the Android numbers due to the Droid phone releases at Verizon (VZ). With their incredible reach, we might be able to observe the trends relating to number of phones that are activated reflected shortly in Android browser market share.
| July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | October 2009 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSIE (all) | 67.59% | 66.75% | 66.61% | 64.65% |
| Firefox | 19.09% | 21.99% | 21.13% | 21.70% |
| Chrome | 1.83% | 2.27% | 2.38% | 2.28% |
| iPhone | 0.45% | 0.59% | 0.58% | 0.66% |
| Android | 0.04% | 0.04% | 0.04% | 0.05% |
About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors – a very significant sample size. The data reported solely reflects our data.
Weekly Search Engine Market Share Update
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
| 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.
Search Engine Market Share Update October 2009
As mentioned in my previous post about browser usage, I’m going to start posting more data, more often. This week I’m putting out search engine market share numbers. I haven’t posted a U.S. search engine market share update since March 2008, so I’m definitely overdue!
Rather than providing a simple set of monthly numbers, I’ve decided to provide weekly breakdowns using aggregate data from our suite of search marketing tools, which makes it possible you review a few months worth of data at a detailed level. I’ll try to update these every two weeks, with weekly breakdowns for now, to try and identify trends in very granular ways. Interesting high-level, and consistent growth for Bing, overall growth for Yahoo! as demonstrated in this chart. Remember, this is based on clickthrough activity.
Astute observers may note that these numbers differ from other reports. Our data is collected at the web site level, based on actual referrals received. While people may search any of these engines more often, but not click through to the results. We report on the activity we see hitting the network of sites we’re tracking, and we are very careful to report only on the search referral traffic, so this won’t include referral traffic from Yahoo mail or gmail, for example. We’ve also rolled up all the various types of Google search activity into “Google” and not separated out Google Image Search / Blog Search, etc.
U.S. weekly search engine market share breakdowns
As you can see, Yahoo! and Bing have been climbing, slowly but steadily, as a percentage of overall search engine referral activity. For more details, please view the weekly breakdown chart below.
| Yahoo | Bing | Others | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 5 | 82.74% | 9.49% | 4.99% | 2.77% |
| April 13 | 82.65 | 9.60% | 4.99% | 2.76% |
| April 20 | 82.03% | 9.85% | 5.30% | 2.82% |
| April 27 | 82.20% | 9.62% | 5.41% | 2.76% |
| May 4 | 81.26% | 9.55% | 5.22% | 3.97% |
| May 11 | 80.98% | 9.69% | 5.17% | 4.16% |
| May 18 | 79.94% | 10.45% | 5.32% | 4.29% |
| May 25 | 80.06% | 10.39% | 5.37% | 4.19% |
| June 1 | 79.80% | 10.44% | 5.39% | 4.37% |
| June 8 | 79.48% | 10.69% | 5.53% | 4.30% |
| June 15 | 79.41% | 10.54% | 5.79% | 4.26% |
| June 22 | 79.40% | 10.56% | 5.79% | 4.26% |
| June 29 | 79.52% | 10.37% | 5.62% | 4.48% |
| July 6 | 79.51% | 10.46% | 5.48% | 4.55% |
| July 13 | 79.69% | 10.31% | 5.56% | 4.44% |
| July 20 | 79.61% | 10.30% | 5.62% | 4.48% |
| July 27 | 78.21% | 11.18% | 6.18% | 4.43% |
| August 3 | 78.77% | 10.95% | 6.06% | 4.22% |
| August 10 | 77.92% | 11.54% | 6.36% | 4.18% |
| August 17 | 77.33% | 11.82% | 6.80% | 4.06% |
| August 24 | 78.11% | 11.51% | 6.27% | 4.11% |
| August 31 | 78.62% | 11.27% | 6.27% | 4.11% |
| 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% |
In context of all three engines, here’s a chart of the global search engine referral rate market share numbers which does show interesting trends over the last few months.
Search Engine referral rate activity report
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.
Let me know if you would like a similar report for the UK, Canada or other areas, please.
Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox Continue to Grow; Don't Ignore Mobile
Around this time last year, I looked at browser market share in the context of Google’s Chrome browser release. The market has definitely changed quite a bit since last year. Most surprisingly for me is how Chrome rebounded from a soft launch. Firefox, Chrome and Safari now account for nearly 31% of search queries worldwide, up 50% over September, 2008. Interestingly, Firefox and Safari have both grown by almost 45% in their combined market share vs. November, 2008.
At first glance this particular data set doesn’t appear to help much with SEO. But usability is a major concern of any SEO, and browser compatibility is key to usability. So SEOs need to understand these trends and plan accordingly to render properly within the leading browsers.
Separately, my friend Cindy Krum is always asking me about mobile browser data. Total mobile browser market share now surpasses 1% of all search engine referral browser views. Not surprisingly, the iPhone leads the pack at is at almost 0.6% marketshare, which is significant, and double the share vs. April of this year. RIM, Opera and Android and a few others make up the remainder. One year ago, Android was a non-issue. Now, it’s 0.04%. Still tiny, but noticeable. SEOs need to pay attention to this emerging trend. The real estate in the organic listings on the mobile browsers is much smaller, and the likelihood of people on mobile browsers going to page 2 in the results is also lower, so being at the top of the page one listings in mobile really is all that matters.
| July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSIE (all) | 67.59% | 66.75% | 66.61% |
| Firefox | 19.09% | 21.99% | 21.13% |
| Safari | 5.12% | 6.86% | 7.08% |
| Chrome | 1.83% | 2.27% | 2.38% |
| iPhone | 0.45% | 0.59% | 0.58% |
| Android | 0.04% | 0.04% | 0.04% |
About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors – a very significant sample size.
Lastly, yesterday marked the kick-off for SMX East. Sadly, I’m not going to be there this year, as I had to bow out at the last minute for personal reasons. I know a few people, Jessica Bowman among them, had commented that were looking forward to some data, so in that vein, I hope this provides some insight into what’s going on in the search world. More data on blog posts to come.
postscript – for those who don’t like having 2 windows open… here’s the numbers from last year…
| Date | Chrome | Firefox | Safari | MS IE (All) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09/30/08 | 0.501% | 15.007% | 4.321% | 79.832% |
| 10/15/08 | 0.433% | 15.387% | 4.178% | 79.592% |
| 10/20/08 | 0.462% | 15.643% | 4.296% | 79.183% |
Microsoft Bing Tracked
Someone asked me yesterday if we could report on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. They were concerned because their present analytics vendors, (plural) were not tracking it properly or at all.
I am happy to confirm that yes, we added bing.com upon its release, and you are able to see it recorded within your Enquisite Optimizer search analytics reports.
I was chatting with someone in Marketing from Bing.com last night at the SMX Advanced event in Seattle, and they were quite interested to find out we were already tracking their results, and I proposed that we publish a note next week, and subsequent follow-on posts about how their marketshare is evolving. She was excited to see the results. So, next week, I’ll start putting together data to post on Bing.com’s evolving marketshare.
Keep watching this space…
Google Chrome Market Share Update
In late August, Google released the Chrome browser. Five days after
release, its market share had exploded to 2%–which really was quite strong
for a product put on the market without much fanfare, and competing against
established heavyweights like Firefox and Internet Explorer. At that time,
I posted a daily breakdown on Chrome’s market share growth, and at the
end of my post I promised to circle back and look at the uptake numbers
after a few weeks of use.
Which brings us to today. There were two ways Chrome’s user base and market
share could go: up or down. The initial 2% number represented the very
early adopters who would either stick with it and evangelize the product (in
which case we’d witness continued growth in the overall percentage of Chrome
browser visits) or the novelty would wear off and they would abandon the
Chrome browser. So what was the verdict?
| Date | Chrome | Firefox | Safari | MS IE (All) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09/30/08 | 0.501% | 15.007% | 4.321% | 79.832% |
| 10/15/08 | 0.433% | 15.387% | 4.178% | 79.592% |
| 10/20/08 | 0.462% | 15.643% | 4.296% | 79.183% |
The numbers unequivocally show that Chrome doesn’t appear to be gaining
any lasting traction, yet. The early adopters have opted out and seem to have
returned to their original browsers–and on a side note, take a look at the
consistent drop in Microsoft Internet Explorer usage. Interesting.
For those interested in our methodology: we gathered data from more than
1,500,000 unique browsers within each of the three two-week periods being
referenced. I hope that during the December holiday break I’ll have a
chance to pull a more comprehensive set of data and also provide more
information on the IE trend I mentioned earlier.
Search Engine Referral Rates by Page in SERPs
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.
Enquisite Pro Now Available
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, as long as possible. 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.
Search Engine Market Shares 2007
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.
