This may surprise no one: Google is the leading source of traffic for 23 of the top 30 websites. That's according to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney in a document released yesterday to clients. Based on underlying comScore data, the report analyzes visits to the top five websites in several verticals: Media, Retail, Travel, Auto, Finance and Health. It doesn't discuss the impact or relative position of Facebook at all, possibly because Facebook is not yet a public company. Mahaney points out that Google's retention of the position of top traffic referrer is an accomplishment in a marketplace t [...]

Related Topics: Google: Web Search | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size | Top News

Last November Canadian digital agency Mediative (owned by Canada's Yellow Pages Group) released an eye- and click-tracking study focused on Google Places and Google Maps on the PC. We wrote up the results when they were published. Mediative then followed up that study with a similar one focused on the Google Places app on the iPhone. For the iPhone-app study, just published yesterday, Mediative monitored eye- and click-tracking with 12 people in Canada. They ranged in age from 21 to 45. The participants were asked to find places to get a tattoo in each of several Canadian cities. Here's the [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News

Marketers have had a couple weeks to digest their fourth quarter numbers and assess their successes and failures from a period that can be a whirlwind, particularly in the retail sector. Now, with Google's Q4 earnings report and Yahoo's out, we're getting a chance to compare our own performance to data put out by some of the major agencies and technology platforms. Earlier this month, we released the RKG Digital Marketing Report with this in mind. Our goal is that it serves as a credible benchmark for advertisers who don't enjoy the luxury of viewing results across multiple sites with multi [...]

Related Topics: Search & Analytics | Search Marketing | Stats | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size

The longest search queries are happening on Ask.com, where users average almost five words per search. That's according to research from Chitika. The ad network analyzed search referrals on "hundreds of millions" of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals -- at an average of 4.81 words -- came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied. It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Search & Society: General | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | Stats: Search Behavior

A couple of Q4 2011 reports released this week from Marin Software and IgnitionOne show, among other things, the dramatic growth of mobile paid search advertising. According to the IgnitionOne document, the "mobile [paid] search ad spend is up 269% YoY and impressions are up 317%." IgnitionOne said that among its retail clients, "Mobile search [  ] accounted for 24% of retailers’ total paid search budgets on Black Friday, compared to 14.2% of the total during all of Q4. This represents enormous growth compared to Q4 2010, when mobile search spend accounted for only 5.2% of total retail p [...]

Related Topics: Search Marketing: Mobile | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size