Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

According to this from Hitwise, searches for credit cards have doubled, presumably as people gear up for the holidays. Apparently this increase in searches happens in November every year.

Labels: hitwise, keywords

New numbers released for August search engine marketshare from HitWise

SearchEngineLand had a post about Nielsen NetRating's numbers a few days ago. For some reason NetRatings is showing a lot smaller percentage for Google. But they're showing growth in MSN's share of the pie.

HitWise's numbers seem to be more in line with reality based on traffic distribution I'm seeing to clients' sites--at least when it comes to Google's share of the market.

Labels: hitwise, search engine stats, search trends

Logically, when I search for things, there are certain descriptive words I use to find what I am looking for. I might be looking for "low cost health insurance" or "cheap flights", or even "free music". Different people search differently of course, but there are definitely more popular trends or ways of describing what you're looking for. Bill Tancer from HitWise recently posted some data on his blog about the words people use to look for deals, discounts, and otherwise value-oriented search terms. A few clear trends emerged, including the fact that people search for "discount" when looking for consumer goods, "cheap" when searching for travel, and "free" when looking for electronic downloads, music, or other low priced items that could conceivably be offered for free. It's important to understand the way people search, because even though a cheap and discount travel might mean exactly the same thing, your choice of words can make a huge difference in traffic to your site. Do your keyword research and then check your log files to see how people are finding your site.

Labels: hitwise, keyword research, keywords

When you think of online auctions, what comes to mind? Of course it's eBay. eBay has firmly cemented itself as the only place to go when you want to buy or sell online. Technically, there are a lot of other auction sites, but based on the traffic market share eBay controls, they're pretty much the only game in town.

Check out the figures from HitWise


Yahoo is closing their U.S. auction site in June. They don't really say why, but it's pretty obvious they're fighting a losing battle and they are making a lot more from eBay as an advertiser than they ever did with the auction site.

Between eBay and eBay motors, they account for 94% of the traffic to auction sites. This is according to HitWise, which usually has pretty reliable numbers. I wonder how in the world gunbroker.com landed in the third spot? And where is Overstock Auctions? Overstock really pushed auctions hard at first. It's buried on their site now, but it's still up and running as far as I can tell. Regardless, that kind of market dominance is incredible! Microsoft might be close to that kind of dominance with their OS, but who else? Very few markets are dominated by a single company like that.

The crazy thing is that Google is on track to do the same kind of thing with the search market. Every year their share of the market just keeps going up and the other search engines can't keep up. I doubt Google will ever get to 90% of the total search traffic, but I didn't think they'd become as dominant as they are now, either.

Labels: auctions, ebay, hitwise

Dang! I thought Google dominated the search market in the US. Check out these UK search engine numbers from Hitwise - Google's got a stranglehold on the market with nearly 80% of UK searches!

Here's a recent press release with US figures for comparison. According to these numbers, Google has 64% of all searches in the US (and growing).

Labels: google, hitwise