Search marketing stats round up

Here's a selection of recent search stats, taken from a range of sources, including Econsultancy's Search Marketing Statistics document, which forms part of the Internet Statistics Compendium, and other reports...

US search engine rankings (comScore)

• Americans conducted 13.8bn searches in September 2009, with Google accounting for 64.9%.
• Yahoo was next on 18.8%, followed by Microsoft on 9.4% and Ask on 3.9%.

UK search market share (Efficient Frontier)

• Google's share of UK search spend was 86.5% in Q3 2009, Yahoo was next on 9.1%, while Bing took 4.3%.

Search and branding (Google / Heineken)

• Based on a study of the impact of search on a Heineken campaign, a search impression alone creates 23% more brand preference for Heineken than the whole campaign without search. A search click creates 69% more brand preference.
• Search proved to be 53% more cost efficient than TV in creating 'Top of Mind Awareness'.

UK search market value (Econsultancy Search Engine Marketing Trends Briefing)

• Econsultancy estimates that the total UK market for search engine marketing (SEM) will be worth in excess of £3bn in 2009.
• Of this, the UK paid search marketplace will grow by 12% in 2009 to a value of £2.71bn.
• The UK natural search (SEO) market will grow by 14% to £376M

Mobile search

• 55.1% of mobile users used a search engine on their iPhone, compared with 31.9% of all smartphone users, and 12.3% for all mobiles. (comScore)
• Only 5% of companies are paying to advertise on mobile search listings. That percentage has not increased since last year, although 23% are planning to do this. (Econsultancy UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report)

Length of search queries (Experian Hitwise)

• Searches of one word length make up 24.32% of all queries. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 2% between August and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 6%.

Search conversion rates (Engine Ready)

• A study which tracked 20.8 million visits to 26 online retail sites over a 12 month period, found that the overall conversion rate from paid search was 2.03% compared to 1.26% from organic search.
• It also found that paid search visitors purchased, on average, more than their organic counterparts.