Search Perspectives

December 24th, 2006 by Alan

This post will offer data on Search Engines and Searchers. Its short and to the point. I have been asked over and over again for this, so here it is in print. Most of this information is compiled from reputable third party research firms. The data is taken from reports in 2004 through 2006.

Organic Ranking Visibility
(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)
Data is for Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

62% of all users will click on a result on the first page.

Position 1 - 100%
Position 2 - 100%
Position 3 - 100%
Position 4 - 85%
Position 5 - 60%
Position 6 - 50%
Position 7 - 50%
Position 8 - 30%
Position 9 - 30%
Position 10 - 20%
source: enquiro and Jupiter Research

Paid Search Visibility
(shown in a percentage of participants looking at the ad in this location)
Data is for Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Paid Ad Position 1 – 50%
Paid Ad Position 2 – 40%
Paid Ad Position 3 – 30%
Paid Ad Position 4 – 20%
Paid Ad Position 5 – 10%
Paid Ad Position 6 – 10%
Paid Ad Position 7 – 10%
Paid Ad Position 8 – 10%
source: enquiro

Search Engine Volume
Percentage of all online searches performed.

Google 64.49%
Yahoo 21.65%
MSN 5.78%
(does not calculate live.com, we estimate MSN with Live.com to encompass 9.59% based on 2006 research)
Ask 4.76%

source hitwise

Organic vs Paid Clicks
(Reports the percentage of users clicking on a natural or paid ad on the SERPS)
Compiled by Search Engine

Google:
Paid - 23.3%
Natural Search - 76.7%

Yahoo:
Paid - 30.6%
Natural Search - 69.4%

MSN:
Paid - 45.5%
Natural Search -54.5%
source Enquiro & Marketing Sherpa

Other Search Data

36% of searchers believe that the websites that are returned in the top of the search results are the top brands in their industry.

41% of searchers continuing an unsuccessful search will change search engines or change the term when they don’t find what they are looking for on the first page of results.

82% of searchers will restart an unsuccessful search using the same search engine and the searcher will add more terms to try and find the right results.

source iProspect 2004 report

Technorati Tags: seo, research, paid search, natural search, paid search visibility, organic ranking visibility, google, yahoo, msn, search engine volume