If You’re Not On Page #1, You’re Nowhere: Google Users Don’t Click Next.

I’ve been working hard at my company to improve our search engine rankings. We don’t have a big budget so ads are out. That means I’m solely focused on organic results driven by content and social networks: Organic SEO and Social SEO Since I took my positions there have been 2 major changes to Google’s algorithms adding social results and addressing content farms and link bait pages.

In that time 7 out of 16 of the search terms we’ve been targeting have brought up pages on our site on the front page of Google. I always knew that most users don’t go past the first page from intuition, behavior and articles I’ve read, but I didn’t know the most recent numbers. Now I do:

According to Chitika Insights 94% of Google clicks happen on the first page of results only 6% go past the first page. This means that if you’re not on the first page, you’re nowhere. Of course these are very generic numbers and for some things and in some industries more users may go to page two but not an appreciable amount.

Search Versus Social Media Results

Few companies are willing to post numbers or results from their search engine and social media engagements. This leaves a ton of forums full of people asking what works, what doesn’t, what kind of results they can expect, etc. and no one is sharing answers. Some numbers can’t be shared for competitive reasons: how much you spent on a campaign, your exact numbers, elements of your strategy, etc., but some can. In the charts below the actual volumes have been removed but there is still some very strong data that I’d like to share with you that will hopefully help inform brand and agency strategists.

Data

This data is very specific to my current employer, a financial software company, and some very specific tactics that have been undertaken. The company has a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presence. While we Tweet, Facebook, and Linked at least once a day, based on some of the earlier number we received we decided to run ads on LinkedIn. Leveraging these channels as well as spending a good amount of time creating content and optimizing our website for search engines has led to the following findings:

Our Unique Visits from LinkedIn far outweigh traffic from other referring sites. To be clear, these results are outside of direct visits or referring sites like outside blogs, portals, even traffic from our own newsletter. They are merely focused on the traffic from Google, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Very often people swill stop investigating here. Focusing on the site sending them the most traffic. But, that traffic isn’t always qualified traffic. In the chart on the right, it’s clear that while our Page Views from LinkedIn users outweigh those from Facebook and Gmail, we get a much larger number of page views from Twitter and Google. To me, this means these sources contain visitors that are much more engaged, qualified and interested in our content.

As you can see above, LinkedIn represents our greatest percentage of new users. Gmail may sound a bit strange except that my company uses Gmail as our email tool so any clicked link in our email signatures or included in the body of an email  shows up as a visitor. This is very important since it remains one of our primary sources of communications and sales. Combined with data concerning Unique Visitors we can differentiate which sites give us more repeat traffic versus which sites give us more new traffic. An important distinction when deciding which marketing messages go to which sites. Bounce Rate isn’t a huge concern primarily because our site is information, not ecommerce. This means that our Call to Action (CTA) is for the user to call or email our business intelligence team rather than visit another page. However, when combined with Page Views and Time on Site, it is a good indicator of user interest or qualification.

Time on Site indicates how long a person spend on the site. It’s interesting to note how closely this mimics the number of page views. The first observation is pretty obvious since reading more pages would take more time, but then again, you could take more time reading a single page.

Findings

Initially Twitter looked like a bit of a loss for us. We got a minimal amount of traffic, and to be honest, our audience isn’t really that prolific on Twitter. However, if you look closely, even though visitors from Twitter were minimal, they had the largest amount of page views and a close second for number of pages visited. This means that we’ll continue to cultivate traffic through Twitter hoping for a growth in visits.

I mentioned that we ran a set of 3 ads on LinkedIn for the company. Despite the hype around Facebook ads, based on earlier numbers concerning bounce rate, time on site, pages visited, and contextuality we decided not to run ads on Facebook. LinkedIn ads allowed us to zero in on a highly defined group of users based on industry (we’re a very small niche of the financial industry), countries, states, even gender. LinkedIn best practices says “good ads have a CTR greater than 0.025%“. Our rates were .056%, .074%, and .087%. Our ads worked. We opted for a CPC (Cost Per Click) model rather than a CPM (Cost Per Impression). It’s a good thing, our impressions were 1300 times what our clicks were. Since clicks show interest, and impressions may not even be seen, this made sense to us. In addition our average click cost was actually half of what our click bid was!

Recommendations

Clearly this data is not going to define your strategy. It is unique to our company, not even our industry. I do hope that it will help inform you. You may decide we are nuts not to be advertising on Facebook, or convinced that we’re just not using Twitter effectively enough. All possible. Unfortunately digital strategy, for all of it’s data, still requires much experimentation. I encourage you to experiment, track your numbers (but don’t get wrapped up in daily results, look at trends), and define a respectable schedule to gather data over. Decisions shouldn’t be made over a few days’ worth of data, but over a few months, keeping in mind global events, holidays, etc.

Good luck.

Global v US Statistics: Mobile, Social Network, PC Ownership

I found some interesting statistics today:

Global
Population 6.9 billion (http://www.census.gov)
PCs 1.3 billion
Mobile phones 5 billion (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10569081)
Social network users 901 million (Business Wire)
TVs 1.6 billion (Business Week Aug 1, 2005)

US
Population 311 million (http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html)
PCs 164 million
Mobile phones 293 million
Social network users 142 million (Nielsen)

China
Population 1.3 billion
PCs 16 million
Mobile phones 853 million
Social network users 265 million (http://www.emarketer.com)

In some cases direct links are given, in other a certain amount of extrapolation was required from multiple sources as much of this data is out of date or in incongruous formats.

Update: Internet Users Update 100% More

The recent study released by Pew Internet & Family Life project shows that Internet users that use Twitter, Facebook status and other status services is up 100% since April. 19% of Internet users are telling us what they’re doing, constantly. Approximately 87% of Americans are Internet users (I say approximately as 3 different studies gave me 3 different percentages).

It’s obvious that status updates are becoming increasingly pervasive. Facebook recently revamped their home page design to accommodate more immediate feeds and Twitter continues to grow. Status broadcast news has seen an explosion on Twitter, from consumers posting hot news items like the January Hudson River plane landing to live updates from Fox, CNN, etc. This last bit is important. The most immediate news has always been via radio and TV. As celestial radio station listener numbers shrink, it’s value as a news source has as well. Television continues to dominate news, except for those Americans that still have jobs. No one brings their 52″ LCD to work, yet. This means that the American workforce can receive the latest news via Twitter or Facebook through their work computer, even their phones.

Introducing this value to users, as well as major pushes from Oprah and Ellen has increased Twitter usage dramatically. A recent estimate by eMarketer expects there to be 26 million Twitter users by 2010.

Download the Pew Internet & Life Project study here.

Nielson: Shift in User Behavior on the Web

According to a recent article, Nielson say the number of U.S. consumers who frequent online video destinations has climbed 339% since 2003, while time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000% over the same period. In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10%, while the number of streams grew 41%, the streams per user grew 27%, and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71%.

Meanwhile, there are 87% more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883% more time devoted to those sites. In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73%, while in February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

On How Many Sites Do You Upload or Download Media Files?

A recent study shows that images are the most often shared digital files and podcasts are the least shared. It got me thinking, how many different sites do people interact with to upload or download media files. These files can include but are not limited to images, videos, audio, blogs, documents (such as Google Docs,  SlideShare, resumes), etc.

How Manys Sites Do You Visit That Require A Password?

Many sites, from social networks to news organizations to your utility providers, require a login and password. It can certainly become a chore managing all of those multiple passwords. Many people use the same ones, some use universal passwords when possible. How many sites do you use that require a password? Don’t count web-based email accounts or social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

How Many Social Networks Do You Belong To?

There has been alot of talk about the amount of people using social networks. Many theorize that a select few belong to multiple SoNets, some theorize that millions belong to at least one SoNet. I’m curious, how many are single network members versus heavy social network visitors?

I‘ll leave the poll open so the data can continue to update.

How Many Email Accounts Do You Have?

As new services pop up, or people change jobs, they often continue to maintain old email accounts while adding on new ones. After reading some shaky data, I decided to ask my network. I’ll leave the poll open indefinitely so it should continue to update dynamically.

Chinese Network, Oh Yes They Do!

A Netpop survey recently released shows that Internet users in China outpace Americans when it comes to social networking in not only numbers but percentages. 92% of broadband users in China contribute to social networks while 76% do so in America. Because of the population differences, this means that 224 million Chinese are communicating through social networks compared to 105 million Americans.

Other facts uncovered:

43% of China’s broadband users (105 million) contribute to forums and discussion boards.

The most prolific group is young professionals (25-29).

37% of bloggers (29 million) post daily.

41 million Chinese engage in 6 or more activities that connect with 84 people on a weekly basis.

Read the full article here.

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