A lot of numbers seem to get thrown around the searchblogosphere. I closely follow a shorter list of numbers that matter.
Search referral market share is right up at the top of the list, because as always it helps prioritize our clients’ time and money.
comScore does a nice job of breaking it out, but I still think the numbers are wrong, for all practical purposes. Look at your site’s referral data. Probably Google’s lead is bigger than comScore suggests.
The latest study has Google over Yahoo 40-30 or so. MSN’s 14.2% and Ask Jeeves 6.5% are flattering to those companies, but you likely won’t find anywhere close to those numbers if you look at your site’s stats.
In other news, the majority of this site’s search referral traffic is now coming from searches for a well-known “hottie” we posted about awhile back. We’re still waiting to get rich off that Long Tail… but if need be we’ll just turn this into a Scarlett portal, and sell mugs & thongs.
Also, overall site traffic continues to undergo a renaissance due to RSS feeds, direct navigation, and navigation from links on other sites. Search engine referrals now make up a smaller proportion of Traffick.com’s referrals, which I guess means the site has reduced its reliance on search engines. About which more soon.
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
