Something funny is happening at Google.
Organizations using pay-per-click Google ads are seeing costs rise, and to date the excuse has been increased competition. (Google ads are an auction-based system, and as more companies shift ad dollars online, even in a recession, the jostling pushes prices up.) Google reported healthy results in fourth quarter 2008 with $5.7 billion in revenue, up 18% from Q4 2007. "Search query growth was strong," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
But Google's rising revenue may mask that people are using its search engine less.
When we visit the search giant's own Google Trends for assessing search volume, all signals are down. These graphs from Google show five years of search volume based on the average for the entire time period. We punched in a series of common phrases (see blue text at top of each chart) that people would seek online.
As the economy slowly entered a tailspin, search queries for "financial services" trended down -- when you'd think people would be researching brokers. "Debt consolidation," perhaps the hottest topic as people fear losing their mortgages, also declined after a peak of interest in 2006.
Love is perennial, but apparently guys searching for flowers are about 20% off since 2004.
Well, let's see how tech enthusiasts are using it. Surely people researching shiny new digital toys would start at a search engine ...
Or we could try disease. The aging U.S. population continues to age, and unfortunately cancer occurrences rise as people get older.
Last try. Sex. A human need. Let's pick a phrase that might be queried by both men and women:
Aggregate use of Google for common search terms is fading. Why? Consumers continue to grow more comfortable with the internet and may not need a search front-door to navigate. If you want lingerie, you now know that Victoria's Secret has a web site. And the shift of consumers to user reviews, blogs, Facebook, and user-generated video are hours not using Google.
Google remains the single most effective form of advertising media -- because you only pay when a customer actively searching for your service clicks on your ads, and the costs to generate leads are still far below all other media. Even with escalating competition and slight decreases in demand, PPC Adwords must be part of most marketing budgets. But the trend is one to watch. Consumers are already moving to social media, and soon cell phones with tiny screens will be the main path online. Google is still the leader, but its pace is slowing down.
4 comments:
I don't think you can conclude anything about overall search volume here. What you can conclude is that the specific term you input have trended down. That could be for a number of reasons. For instance, those terms have declined in popularity relative to what they once were. That explanation says nothing about overall search volume. That volume increased tremendously for Google from mid 2007 through at least mid 2008 (http://searchengineland.com/compete-google-keeps-stomping-the-others-in-search-traffic-14218).
I'd be careful about inferring too much about the whole based on relative trends in specific terms. "Sex" has held on pretty well, slightly above average at the end of 2008. "Twitter" shot up like a rocket. "Auto bailout" is another biggie.
The SearchEngineLand stats look suspect. The table in your link claims total Google searches went up from 4.4 billion to 6.7 billion from 5/07 to 5/08 -- a 50% increase in total search volume within one year. (!) Something in that data seems a bit off.
I'd be interested in seeing how Google search volumes are doing on a share-of-customer basis. It is possible that total searches are increasing as other nations continue PC penetration; in the U.S., I suspect search volumes are slightly declining as consumers spend more time on social media tools.
Any other stats out there for the overall 5-year trend in the U.S. are welcome.
May I offer a non-quantitative thought? Having spent much of my career as researcher/investigator of last resort, I suspect that a search like "sexy lingerie" produces more chaff than wheat. But - taking Ben's point - it's a popular search. A varied and motivated population gets the too much chaff/not enough wheat response.
My guess is that the population then diffuses as people experiment with variations - e.g.
lingerie (without "sexy")
lingerie -sexy (same thing for someone who knows about google's boolean commands)
lingerie +silk (someone trying to work around the chaff)
I could come up - in minutes - with twenty or thirty easy "second steps." My understanding is that each of those second steps - now disaggregated from the big population who used the popular, but in the end awkward "sexy lingerie" search - now don't show up as a large number - they've dispersed, and would have to be tracked differently.
My apologies if that was overlong. And because my perspective is as someone (perceived as) a skilled searcher - I don't know much about aggregates of searches. If my reasoning is wrong, I'd be happy to know why.
That's a great point. If I understand you right, searches may be moving into more obscure, "long tail" type terms.
Bud Gibson points out several data sets that indicate Google search volumes are up. Our own random testing of very basic terms using Google Trends show consistently that search volumes down. It's all confusing and conflicting, but one thing is certain, online search works -- but has become a much more competitive space for advertisers to make their mark.
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