Hitwise: Google Receives 71% Market Share in the US

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Google is gaining market share, says Hitwise. According to Hitwise’s latest report, Google receives 71% market share of searches, while Yahoo! receives 18.26%, MSN (Live) receives 5.32%, Ask.com receives 3.45% and the remaining 46 other engines accounted for 1.95% all together.

Search Engines Market Share US 08 2008
Search Engines Market Share US 08 2008

The change vs. July 2008 is not significant, however comparing to August 2007, it is very clear that Google is growing and taking market share from rivals Yahoo! and MSN (LIVE).

Search Engines Market Share

While the Yahoo! search engine market share decrease is “only” ~5 points compared to last year from the total searches, these points represent a 20% decrease from the share Yahoo! had last year. With MSN (LIVE) it’s even more extreme – the ~1 point the lost which may seem insignificant in the general scope, represents 17% of their market share last year – lost.

Search Engines Market Share US 08 2007
Search Engines Market Share US 08 2007

Mmm… So what does this all mean to us?

First, it’s kinda interesting for us as marketers to get insights and understand the trends of the industry we’re part of 🙂 But seriously, this tool can help greatly to plan the media budgets for the upcoming year.

If (and the “if” is critical) our performance on all 3 media outlets (Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter) is similar in its KPI indicators (conversion rates, cost of clicks, value of traffic, cost per action etc.), the classic action would be to divide our budget evenly between them, pro rata to their market share as follows

Budget Allocation % Budget USD (sample)
Microsoft adCenter 5.32% USD 1,000
Yahoo! Search Marketing 18.26% USD 3,432
Google AdWords 71.01% USD 13,347

According the this market share data and table, for each USD 1,000 spent on Microsoft adCenter, we’d invest USD 3,432 on Yahoo! Search Marketing and USD 13,347 on Google AdWords in order to keep our advertising budget spread inline with the users behavior.

BUT

and it’s a big BUT!

This ALL CHANGES if our KPI’s as explained above are changing. Once MSN adCenter can provide better conversion rate, better cost per action than any of the others, we will need to “milk it” to the fullest extent and take advantage of the inventory they have to offer, on account of the underperforming media outlets.

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