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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Search Engine Landscape in the UK Post 2 of 2

November 16, 2006

Yesterday I posted some statistics on search engine share in the UK. Today, I am going to walk through some analysis we've done on the paid and organic search traffic.

Unsurprisingly, our analysis found that whilst you don't need to pay to play, leading e-commerce players engage in at least some paid search marketing.

You don't need to pay to play

Many leading UK websites receive little to no search traffic from paid listings, with MySpace, Bebo and the BBC all receiving less than 1% of their search traffic from paid listings.
Autotrader was the #1 ranked Automotive website based on share of UK internet visits in the week ending 21st October 2006 and received only 5% of its search traffic from paid terms.
Analysis of the top 10 sites in the Insurance, Appliances & Electronics, and Travel Agencies categories found no positive correlation between the percentage of search traffic from paid listings and the market share of visits a site receives. This indicates that paid search is not a defining factor for a high rank in a category.

However big e-commerce players tend to pay

Amazon UK received 13% of its search traffic from paid listings in the four weeks to 21st October 2006 and eBay UK received 37% of its search traffic from paid listings.
Analysis of the top 10 ranked websites based on market share of UK internet visits in the week to 21st October 2006 in the Travel Agencies, Appliances and Electronics and Insurance categories reveals that there is a great deal of variety in the proportion of paid and organic traffic to websites in these categories. The scatterplot diagram below, which compares the share of upstream visits from Search Engines to the proportion of search traffic coming from paid listings for the top ten Travel Agencies, illustrates this nicely.
Cheapflights.co.uk in particular stands out as a top 10 player with a large proportion of its own traffic coming from Search Engines but a relatively low share from paid listings.

Travel Scatterplot.png

The lesson for marketers is that there is no hard and fast rule for the right mix of paid and organic traffic. Instead, marketers should examine return on investment from specific campaigns whilst constantly testing and adjusting search campaigns.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:02 PM | (2) | (0)