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Has anyone seen differences in traffic or have you changed your habits when using Google. The local search is cool, but is it causing a *new* effect where people just "check it out" but don't take it seriously much like how items on a website marked with a *new* flag are treated.
I am also remembering back in the day when (as a joe surfer type) I got fed up with search engines and decided to start following links instead. Probably due to a major update that caused bogus results for a few days. I hope this isn't something that has affected Google... too bad they don't have a "16 million searches served today" type counter on their site. (That's probably a back-end feature)
Has anyone been complaining?
Yes.
It appears that the sensible posters on this thread are pondering the nature of google visitors, and whether they are worth spending time and effort on.
They most definitely are, at least in the travel sector.
I believe that webmasters and techies are the opinion leaders for their non technical friends.
When we see something we like and mention it to them, they listen and try. When we see something we don't like and mention it, they listen and observe to see if it's true.
I believe word of mouth about google started with people like us and continued as such with the pop up blocking/search toolbar.
A lot of people including myself stopped bookmarking sites as the google results were actually pretty stable. It's sort of like going to McDonalds, even though it changes a little you still know what your going to get or in this case how to find it.
I believe google is shooting themselves in the foot by generating bad PR from word of mouth opinion leaders like ourselves.
If the toolbar wasn't so entrenched I think things would be a way different landscape.
google results aren't stable, it's hard to tell from one day to the next what your going to get and they've recieved a lot of bad PR word of mouth in the last few months from folks like us.
It's too bad, it's so reminiscent of altavista right before they were going to do an IPO which never happened.
This is not at all surprising, because the different engines tend to serve different demographics. Different things will sell better to different groups.
In fact, if you think about the different mindsets of different people, and why the are online in the first place, it should seem like MSN, Yahoo! and AOL should all give you a higher conversion rate.
Yahoo has the pretty bells, whistles and ads that would likely appeal to shoppers. They also have all those Yahoo! stores.
AOL tends to have the newbie users that really don't understand the breadth and depth of what is out there on the internet. But shopping online is one of the things that AOL makes very clear to them that they can do. But AOL users wiull b a much higher percentage of your customers if you are selling cheap widgets than if you are selling high end workstations.
MSN search is sort of a cross between Yahoo and AOL. They have the locked in base of AOL, and they offer some additional portal services like Yahoo.
Then you look at Google's interface and how they get their users. The interface is sparce and not ad heavy.No pretty pictures except on holidays. It loads quickly due to the lack of graphics. To start using google, you had to make a specific, conscious choice to change away from your default.
Google users are more likely to use the internet for things other than buying, you are much more likely to get someone that will be researching a buying decision than you average shopper.
I will say once again, that I have yet to have any problems finding anything that I was shopping for in google. But my tastes just don't seem to be in highly competitive areas. Instead of buying a cruise, I am a lot more likely to buy boat plans.
I'm not saying that y'all are wrong about people moving away from Google. What I am saying is that what you get on this board is anecdotal evidence which does not even rise to the level of circumstantial evidence.
To give you an example, on my large site in March, Google was 78% of the SE traffic, Yahoo was 12%, MSN was 3% and AOL 2%.
Google ranks me well on all sorts of stuff and has 9500 pages indexed.
Yahoo ranks me lower than google. When they served Google SERPs, they were up around 18%. They have around 8000 pages indexed.
MSN ranks me well, when I have a page in their index, but they only have 327 pages! I wonder how well I would do if they had the other 97% of my pages in their index. Who knows, if they had all of my pages, they might just be showing up well ahead of yahoo on that scale.
AOL - I just don't know of anyone involved in the activity that I cover that has an AOL account. I thnk we are just a mismatch with the average AOL customer.
Can you come up with other reasons why you have more sales off of other SEs than "people are leaving google in droves"? While you might be correct, those other reasons might also have some validity.
Of course if yahoo or MSN prove to be better sources of revenue for you, by all means, concentrate on them.
AOL - I just don't know of anyone involved in the activity that I cover that has an AOL account. I thnk we are just a mismatch with the average AOL customer.
Google users are more likely to use the internet for things other than buying, you are much more likely to get someone that will be researching a buying decision than you average shopper.
That may well be true--and it's one reason why Google was smart to launch AdSense as an extension of its AdWords program. The reader who's looking for information on a product, service, destination, etc. may not be ready to click on an AdWord or an affiliate page on Google's search results, but there's a good chance that he'll be ready to buy after he's found the "decision support" that he was looking for. (That's certainly the case for travel sites, if my experience as a publisher is any guide.)
Still, even if you accept the premise that Google users are primarily looking for information (as Google does, to judge from its corporate mission statement), there's always Froogle--and, as time goes by, we'll undoubtedly see other Google services that are geared to shoppers and spenders.
Yahoo have been advertising the toolbar heavily on most of it's portal sites recently.
about dot com has been advertising the M$N toolbar a lot as well. It's also been on M$N.com (no surprises there!). Perhaps the marketing departments for yahoo and M$N have 'done good'!
[edited by: Pikin_It_Up at 7:02 pm (utc) on April 1, 2004]
I also think that you are a lot more likely to get information searchers hitting your commercial site from google.
These two things will lead to a lower conversion rate than a SE that caters to impulse buyers.
Some of the conversion rate issues could also be related to how well your site plays to the audiences of the different search engines. For a lot of people like me, one of the appeals of google is simple clean interface. I like the ssites where I shop to be simple, heavy on the info and light on the bells and whistles.
An extremly visual person would be less interested in google's plain interface, and would rather have a lot of pictures and flash than the sites that I prefer.
So if you have an incredibly beautiful site design, you will probably hava a higher conversion rate from a SE that has more artistic visual appeal.
There is so much that goes into this that it just drives me nuts when people point to one thing and declare that as the reason for the shift in their traffic. Yes, dropping from page one to page three means that you will get less traffic from that SE on that term. But that is as far as you can take that line of reasoning.
I think we can possibly sense a trend starting among serious buyers. If you have a site that has offered the same products or services over time and the design, persentation and purchase options have remained the same, then a comparison of current traffic and sales with previous numbers is valid.
I have such a site and my ranking is Google is about what is has been for most of the past year. As stated earlier, referrals and conversions from Google are down in numbers and percentage, while Yahoo, MSN and AOL are all increasing.
There will always be products and services better suited to those who use a certain SE. If there is a change in the type of person using Google, it seems to me that one indication would be a change in traffic and conversions. Certainly many other factors should be considered and given the weight they deserve, but often the most obvious explanation is correct.
What I'm offering hasn't changed enough to account for the the differences. Maybe with Googles increasing share of overall search referrals among SEs, we are also seeing a change in the profile of that seacher.
As someone noted earlier, "follow the money". I just trying to figure out which way it's going.
