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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Google Finance Gets Visits from Brand Searches

September 14, 2006

In preparing for a presentation yesterday on financial services marketing, I noticed that the term "ebay" is the third highest term sending visits to the Business & Finance Stocks and Shares category. Google Finance is the 6th ranked site receiving visits from searches for "ebay" in the past four weeks, receiving 0.69% of all UK searches for the term which accounted for 33% of visits from search to Google Finance last week. Note that the term "ebay" is the highest volume search term in the UK - ranking ahead of "bebo" and "argos".

At the event this morning Dean Harvey from Spannerworks and I were talking about the opportunities and challenges presented by Google Finance to financial services institutions and to all major brands. In the screen shot below, you can see the prominent link to Google Finance on a search for "ebay" on Google UK.
Google Finance Screen Shot.png
Below the sponsored listing for eBay, is a link with the bolded term "EBAY". This links to Google Finance, as does the chart. If eBay wasn't appearing in the sponsored listings, its link would appear below the Google Finance shortcut.

Google Finance received 33.2% of its visits from searches for "ebay" last week, 8.8% from searches for "wwe" and 5.6% from searches for "dell". The term "wwe" is short for "World Wrestling Entertainment" and today when I searched for the term on Google UK, a similar Google shortcut as displayed above appeared on the page.

What impact has this had on visits to Google Finance?
Google Finance ranked #53 among Stocks and Shares websites based on share of UK visits in the week to 9th September 2006 up from #137 the week to 25th March 2006, the week the site was launched. Share of UK visits to the site has increased 8 fold in the past three months.

The big jump came in mid-June and it appears that this was when the Google Finance shortcut was included in the search engine results page (SERP). The chart below illustrates this very nicely. The dark blue line plots the weekly share of UK internet visits to Google Finance. The red and green lines plot share of visits to Google Finance from searches for "ebay" and "wwe". The second chart below compares share of visits to Google Finance with the site's average session duration. You can see that as visits increased the site's average session duration declined. This is likely because the content on Google Finance is not relevant for many searchers -- such as those looking for eBay or to World Wrestling Entertainment.

Google Finance Searches v Visits.png
Google Finance Session Duration.png
This brings me back to the point we made in our Search Engine Brand Management whitepaper (request a copy here). Marketers can benefit greatly from bidding on their own brand name in the search engines. It is not always necessary, but this example illustrates a situation in which brand marketers should sponsor a listing to appear ahead of the Google Finance shortcut.

As Dean Harvey sagely pointed out this morning - once the customer goes to Google Finance, they are presented with links to "Related Companies", news stories about the firm and blogs that mention the brand. You can't (and shouldn't) control all of the conversation on the internet about your firm's brand - but do control the controllable by ensuring you appear at the top of the SERP for searches for your own brand.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 04:50 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Branding