Search Engine Marketing

Valerie Rados | Account Executive | Advance Media New York

It’s hard to believe that paid search ads (like Google Adwords) have been around for almost 17 years. Google itself will be 19 this fall. Many businesses rely heavily on paid search to help their brands gain search visibility in an increasingly competitive world. Especially those businesses that sell products and services regionally, nationally or internationally. With limited marketing budgets, these paid ads can be the quickest and most inexpensive way to get the brand onto page 1 of search results (the only page that matters).

I could go into all kinds of detail now about how paid search works and what techniques you should use, blah, blah, blah. But instead, I thought it would be fun to look back at the history and share some fun facts. Use these to impress your co-workers at the next work Happy Hour (if they are fellow geeks).

  1. Adwords started in 2000 with roughly 350 advertisers. (source)
  2. Adwords was Google’s second attempt at ad revenue. The first was called Premium Sponsorships. (source)
  3. In 2000 there were only 20 million searches per day on Google vs. over 3.5 billion per day today. (source) Check out this site to see the number of live searches happening.
  4. Ad revenue in 2016 totaled over $79B, vs. just $70M in 2001 (sourceAd Revenue
  5. An 18-year-old college dropout named Scott Banister is credited with the brilliant, multi-billion-dollar idea of pay-for-placement search listings. (source)
  6. Product Listing Ads (or PLAs) were introduced in 2012 (source) and now account for 52% of the click share as of Q1 of this year. For non-brand queries, PLAs drove a whopping 75 percent of all clicks for retailers. (sourceGoogle Spending
  7. Google dominates mobile search due, in part, to being the default search engine on both Android and iOS devices. As of Q1 2017, Google accounted for 97% of mobile phone traffic. (source)
  8. Over a year ago, in early 2016, Google eliminated the right hand rail ads (did you notice?). That change resulted in click-through-rates (CTRs) increasing by 49% for the ads in positions 1-5. Of those, position 3 saw the biggest improvement in CTR with an increase of over 72%! (source)
    SEM CTR
  9. Quality backlinks are the number 1 ingredient to getting the top adrank for your brand in 2017. The “link score” is a Google algorithm for determining just how awesome and abundant your website’s backlinks are. (source)
  10. What is the #1 most expensive keyword category on Google you ask? If you guessed Insurance, you’re correct. Followed by Loans and Mortgage keywords. (source)

Top 20 Keywords

Steve Hodgens - Advance Media New York

Valerie Rados  |  Account Executive
Advance Media New York