Google Continues Search Dominance, Ad Coverage Wanes
According to the latest figures released by comScore qSearch, Google increased its share of searches in the U.S. in April, while all its major competitors lost share or remained stagnant. Also, longer search queries might be one of the reasons why search ad coverage has declined during the past two years.
Google claimed 64.2 percent of the search market in April, a 0.5 percentage point increase from 63.7 percent in March.
Yahoo! took 20.4 percent of the market in April, a slight decline from 20.5 percent in March. Meanwhile, Microsoft had 8.2 percent of the search market in April, a decrease from its 8.3 percent share in the prior month, according to comScore.
Ask.com’s share remained unchanged at 3.8 percent, while AOL LLC finished the month with 3.4 percent of the market, a 0.3 percentage point drop from its 3.7 percent share in March.
Of the 14.8 billion queries conducted in the U.S. in April, 9.5 billion were conducted via Google, 3.0 billion were conducted via Yahoo! and 1.2 billion were conducted via Microsoft.
Nielsen Online pegs Google’s market share in April at 64.0 percent, reflecting 7.8 percent year-over-year growth.
Yahoo!’s share was 16.3 percent in April, MSN/Windows Live had 9.9 percent of the market, AOL claimed 3.7 percent of the market and Ask.com held onto 2.1 percent of all searches in the U.S., according to Nielsen Online.
A blog post written by Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman and co-founder of comScore, explores the declining search ad coverage in the U.S.
Though query volume has grown 68 percent during the past two years, paid clicks have grown at a slower 18 percent rate.
Fulgoni writes that the reason for the sluggish growth in paid clicks “appears to be that the ad coverage (i.e. the percent of search results pages with a paid ad) has dropped from 64% to 51% of searches.”
He touches on two hypotheses:
– “The first hypothesis – that the search engines have been working hard to improve the searcher experience and reduce the importance of less relevant advertisers – has been widely cited, and I believe is the main driver. To help confirm this hypothesis we looked into the rate at which searchers clicked on paid ads and found that the rate hasn’t changed.”
– “But, I also find a second hypothesis to be particularly intriguing. An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch isn’t “buying that.”
He believes that “there are, simply, less advertisers. Far less. Big spenders, the category leaders, are just gone.”
Sources:
http://blog.comscore.com/2009/05/longer_search_queries_driving.html
