Posted by randfish
A great many tech-specific site owners consistently bemoan the fact that market share stats like these:
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Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
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Oct.-07
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Sept.-07
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Oct.-06
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www.google.com
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64.49%
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63.55%
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60.94%
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search.yahoo.com
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21.65%
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22.55%
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22.34%
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search.msn.com
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7.42%*
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7.83%*
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10.72%*
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www.ask.com
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4.76%
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4.32%
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4.34%
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Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending Oct. 27, 2007, Sept. 29, 2007, Oct. 28, 2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
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Source: Hitwise
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don’t come close to their own experiences with search traffic. Since I get into a lot of conversations around Google’s dominant market share and see plenty of raised eyebrows from savvy technologists, bloggers and marketers, I figured I’d ping my good friend Matt Tatham at Hitwise, to see if he could help solve the mystery, which of course, he did (thanks Matt!).
Take a look at the chart below - it shows the percentage of upstream traffic (that’s all traffic - search engines, direct type-in, referral links, email, etc.) to technology and tech media websites. Hitwise places these in two separate categories "IT and Internet" and "IT Media." A site like Sourceforge would probably fit in the former, while SEOmoz would be in the latter.
The graph tells us that Google sends 15.73% of all traffic to all websites. That alone is an interesting figure, as it tells us something about how we surf the web - yes, search is certainly a huge driver of traffic, but it may not be the juggernaut we sometimes think it is. 75%+ of web traffic comes from other sources - following links, typing in domains, email, bookmarks, blogs and social media.
More relevant to our discussion, however, is the data showing that 31.95% of all traffic to "IT Media" sites comes from Google and 5.78% of all traffic to "IT and Internet" sites has Google as the referrer. Let’s compare this data against Yahoo! and MSN/Live to see whether and how much Google is over-represented in the online tech world.
Yahoo! sends 6.92% of all traffic to "IT Media" sites, 1.90% to "IT & Internet" sites and 4.43% of all website referral traffic.
Matt’s taken the time to break out Live.com vs. MSN.com, which gives us a peek into the distribution between the two (Live’s still much smaller). But I’ve combined the data for easy comparison and between the two, Microsoft web search products send 1.61% of traffic to all websites, 2.1% of traffic to "IT Media" and 0.65% to Internet & Technology sites. Taken together, this data gives a chart that looks something like:
Takeaways:
- If you’re in IT Media, there’s a good reason you’re seeing 75-85% of your search traffic come from Google. Don’t panic - you’re not being "under-represented" in Yahoo! & MSN, that’s just the way it is.
- If you look at the Internet & Technology column, you might be surprised to see that Google’s only at around 70%, but my guess is that Yahoo! is actually listed in Hitwise as an "Internet & Technology" website, and they do a very good job of sending a lot of traffic back into the Yahoo! network. Still, 70% is bigger than the 64% market share number, and my guess is it’s even larger than that.
- Google sends 72% of traffic to websites compared to Yahoo!’s 20% and MS’ 7.4% - these numbers don’t quite match up to the search shares, but that’s to be expected. This data tells me that Google is slightly more successful in sending actual traffic to their search results than Yahoo! and Microsoft - perhaps there are more "frustrated" searchers on the other two engines, or perhaps they are both "retaining" more of their searchers inside their own content networks.
In any case, this should help to quell a bit of the fear around the common question:
I get 85% of my traffic from Google - what am I doing wrong in Yahoo! and MSN/Live?
It could likely be that you’re doing nothing wrong at all, and Google simply dominates the upstream search traffic in your niche. For those who are curious, here’s SEOmoz’s breakdown of search referral traffic:
Hitwise doesn’t specifically monitor the webmaster/Internet marketing niche, but I suspect the numbers are even more Google-centric as webmasters tend to be extremely biased in Google’s favor (at least, from a usage perspective).
BTW - I’m not 100% sold on the accuracy of Hitwise’s data. I think that relatively speaking, it’s usually solid, but I wouldn’t go out and swear in court that the numbers are precise. I usually take them with a +/- 25% swing, but it’s certainly better than nothing (and considerably better than Quantcast, Alexa or Compete).
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