Posts Tagged ‘Market Share’
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% |
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.
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.
Search Stats Update - Search Market Share - Ask.com
I haven’t made a Search Statistics update in a while. No excuses. Just haven’t. I’m going to rectify that now, and I’ll put up some more numbers later today or tomorrow.
With all the uncertainty around Ask, and a lot of people discussing how it’s looking like it’s dropping out of the race, I thought I should should post some numbers which reflect what we’re seeing for their share of the search marketplace over the last year and a bit. We used data representing more than 250 Million search referrals since Jan 1 2007.
2007-01 2.50%
2007-02 2.99%
2007-03 1.74%
2007-04 1.68%
2007-05 1.67%
2007-06 1.26%
2007-07 1.02%
2007-08 0.94%
2007-09 1.15%
2007-10 1.23%
2007-11 1.17%
2007-12 1.19%
2008-01 1.25%
2008-02 1.03%
2008-03 0.90%
If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?