The Eightfold Logic Blog
Which Mobile Browsers have the Most Sophisticated Users?
Since I just posted about desktop browser usage, and reported that Mac users may not be, by default, any more sophisticated than Microsoft users, I thought it might be interesting to look at mobile browser usage.
Looks like Blackberry users view the least pages per mobile browser sessions (that’s me), and surprisingly, Palm Pre users are the fastest browsers. On the whole, not a lot of difference across the browsers, which surprised me. I though that iPhone and Android users would exhibit dramatically different behavior than others.
| Mobile Browser | Average Pages Viewed | Average Time on Site |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone | 2.49 | 02:38 |
| Android | 2.45 | 02:51 |
| BlackBerry | 2.13 | 02:48 |
| Palm Pre | 2.78 | 02:36 |
| IE Mobile | 2.48 | 03:13 |
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.
Browser Share Report and More…
Last week I posted some information about user behavior in relation to depth of visit. This week I’m going to share some data regarding how different browsers result in varying user behavior.
For the month of November, I decided to break down the user behavior differences behind Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome. At first glance one would assume that if someone visits a web site time on site and pages viewed should not be affected by browser. Yet, this is not the case. One could argue that Chrome and Firefox users are more sophisticated, as evidenced by the fact that they deleted their default browser, Safari and MSIE usage is almost identical, which should be the norm if default browsers were used, as it reflects the simplest behavior patterns. The most sophisticated users would change away from the defaults, and be faster / less patient in navigating sites.
Are Mac users really any more sophisticated than Windows users; perhaps not…?
| Browser | Percentage of Visitors | Average Pages Viewed | Average Time on Site |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSIE | 60.38% | 4.60 | 0:04:08 |
| Firefox | 25.08% | 3.85 | 0:03:42 |
| Safari | 8.58% | 4.33 | 0:04:01 |
| Chrome | 3.42% | 3.65 | 0:03:35 |
The change in browser usage away from MSIE is truly stunning. I’m going to monitor this drop, and Chrome’s surge in case it was Holiday related. Stranger things have happened.
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.
Google Search Update: Ranking Report Really is Dead (finally)
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.
Does Depth of Referral Affect Quality of Visit?
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.
What Page in the Search Results do People Click On?
What page in the search results do people click on, and depending on that, how many pageviews should you expect, and how long will they spend on your site?
Last year, I made a post on this blog about how deep in the search results do people actually go before they clicked through on a result. At that point I found that the percentage of traffic from page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs) was increasing over time. I finally had an opportunity to revisit that data, and decided to augment the data with two additional pieces of very valuable information to web marketers:
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs spend more time on websites?
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs view more pages on websites?
I’m going to post that information in separate posts, hopefully over the next few days. I’ll also be posting information showing how visitors using different browsers spend differing time on site, and don’t all view the same number of web pages. Time permitting, I’ll also post how that’s true of visitors from different search engines, and dependent on the number of keywords they use in queries. For example if someone visits your site from a search engine and they used just one keyword to search, will they spend more time and view more pages than someone who used two keywords?
First off, the information about how your placement within the search results pages affects your visitor counts. The percentage of traffic from page one in the SERPs has continued to grow steadily, to the point now that if your website is not listed on page one of the search results, your business may as well be invisible. Remember, it’s not that you need to be found on page 1 for your brand name, although that’s useful, you absolutely need to be found on page 1 of the SERPs for terms which your customers are using to find your type of service / product / information.
What page in the search results do visitors visit your site from?
Please note there’s a gap in months, historical data is there to show the trend.
From this graphic, it’s obvious to anyone that if you’re not on page 1 in the search results, you won’t see much traffic. There’s still value to page 2, but it’s an ever shrinking fraction of page one referral traffic.
Of course, the data for the table is included here:
| 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% |
| 2009-10 | 2009-11 | |||||
|
Page 1
|
95.24% | 95.80% | ||||
|
Page 2
|
2.75% | 2.44% | ||||
|
Page 3
|
0.86% | 0.75% | ||||
|
Page 4
|
0.39% | 0.34% | ||||
|
Page 5
|
0.22% | 0.20% |
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.
Search Engine Market Share Update
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:
| 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.
Adtech NYC - Feed Your Brain! Advanced Analytics
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at AdTech New York. I presented on a panel with Ryan deShazer of GyroHSR, the leading B2B agency
Our topic of discussion was titled “Feed Your Brain! Advanced Analytics” and centered on how brand marketers can use data to turn organic search engine optimization (SEO) into a true performance-focused medium, something I have very strong beliefs about, as I know that SEO has been undervalued / underappreciated / and under-invested in by far too many companies, simply because it’s been impossible to value properly. This inability to measure SEO properly led me to start Enquisite, which recently brought to market Enquisite Campaign, a platform which makes it possible to measure the value of SEO to any company’s bottom line.
GyroHSR is one of our partners, and their experience with both the subject matter and platform made this joint presentation a no-brainer. After all, they’ve successfully helped companies forecast, manage and measure SEO campaigns based on value. Previously they had to manage all this by hand, with Enquisite Campaign, they can do it all automatically, making them more efficient so that they can take on more business, operate more efficiently, and deliver more value than ever to their clients.
It’s all about value delivered, and Ryan’s presentation did a great job describing the process. Catch him (and me) at SES Chicago in a few weeks to learn more!
Enquisite Reporting Suite Update
(Nov 2009) We are pleased to announce the November update to the Enquisite Performance Suite. This release includes three new enhancements:
- Bounce Rate, Time on Site, and Page View metrics within Enquisite Optimizer
- Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign
- A 50% speed increase in the core Longtail reporting interface.
Our Enquisite Optimizer product has been enhanced to allow you to see the bounce rate, time on site, and page view metrics for your site as well as any segment of search referral traffic that you create within Optimizer. This has been an outstanding request from publishers and etailers alike.
This screenshot reflects ~10 days worth of data from a web site with ~150k search referrals per day. The segment displayed is showing Google organic search traffic only, where the visitors were searching from within the U.S., and which zip codes they were located in when they visited the business. The map shows the State by State breakdowns (WA is proportionally too high), and the Time on Site / Bounce Rate / PageViews calculation shows us the site average, and the average for just this segment. The system took 5 seconds to calculate the entire dataset, most of which was the time it took me to set the parameters!
This feature was created to provide you with the ability to determine the relevancy and perceived value of the pages on your site. It can help you determine the factors that may compel users who arrive at your site to immediately leave as well as the pages that may entice them to continue to browse. Not only will this help you better structure your site and pages, but it will allow you to understand which pages to focus on in order to best shape the incoming traffic.
Finally, the addition of time on site, page view and bounce rate calculated against both paid or organic search referral segments makes it possible for any search marketer to isolate and identify high value opportunities and optimize campaigns accordingly.
Our Longtail reports is the core of Enquisite Optimizer. We’ve made some code improvements which halve load times, and with a new Database optimization we’re implementing, we expect to reduce load times even more significantly. For all but the largest sites, Optimizer was already blazingly fast for a real-time analysis and insight engine. Now, it’s even faster for everyone!
Finally, we’ve started the process of integrating the segmentation functionality in Optimizer into our Campaign product. This will make it even easier than before to build and manage your search marketing campaigns.
We’ve got a lot more improvements coming in the next few months, and thank-you all for your continued support, suggestions and feedback.
Mobile Browser Market Share Data
As promised to lots of people last week at Pubcon, and to Mike Grehan over at SES, I’m going to start posting even more varied data.
A frequent request from and for search marketers is insight into the mobile browser market. While still tiny in relation to general web traffic when considered from the search perspective, the growing adoption of devices built with web browsing in mind make these numbers are worth watching. I suspect that as iPhones & Android devices become even more ubiquitous, these numbers will continue to grow. Most remarkably, if Blackberry built a better web interface / UI into their devices, I suspect their share would more accurately reflect their general market share for devices in use.
I’ve prepared two charts: one which includes all the mobile browsers; and one with the iPhone removed. The reason is simple - the iPhone is so dominant that it’s impossible to see market share changes for the others without excluding it. This is very much like Google’s overwhelming marketshare dominance in search.
With the iPhone’s market share displayed, it’s hard to make out any of the competitors:
Without the iPhone’s market share displayed, it’s much easier to see the trends starting to emerge:
The obvious insights that I spied immediately were:
1) Android outperforms Blackberry even thought their install base is tiny by contrast.
2) Android’s numbers will be very interesting to watch with Verizon’s big push on their devices.
3) Windows Mobile numbers are horrible! By the time MSFT catches up on search, they’ll realize that they’ve lost their dominant position for being the interface to the web! (IE, mobile etc…)
4) Look at the Palm Pre! For a phone which T-Mobile didn’t really do a great job pushing, their lead on Microsoft is astounding. (yes, I’ve asked for those numbers to be double-checked).
5) Every one of these browsers is growing strongly and steadily. It’s a great sign for the future of mobile marketing!
What are your thoughts?
The raw data for those who prefer the numbers, not the graphics:
| iPhone | Android | Blackberry | Palm Pre | Win Mobile | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 31 | 0.448% | 0.038% | 0.026% | 0.008% | 0.005% |
| Aug 31 | 0.591% | 0.045% | 0.033% | 0.012% | 0.007% |
| Sept 30 | 0.583% | 0.043% | 0.041% | 0.012% | 0.007% |
| Oct 31 | 0.663% | 0.049% | 0.044% | 0.016% | 0.008% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by browsers located in the U.S.
With mobile browsing in particular, I suspect there’s a higher level of incidence than even of browsers who look up information, but never click through to any destination web site, leaving the search engine / resource of choice being the information portal.
Yes, Google is unquestionably a portal when mobile is considered.
Weekly Search Engine Market Share Report Nov 15, 2009
For the first time in months, our weekly trend data of search engine market share as defined by click-through activity shows a small drop in the growth trend on the part of Bing. However, Microsoft (MSFT) has still gained almost a full point of market share over the last two months. Yahoo’s share of search referrals rose a little this week.
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:
| 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% |
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.