We tend to think of AdWords as the domain of PPC specialists, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Google’s SERP advertising has a huge impact on the position and effectiveness of organic results. So, I wanted to ask a simple question – what does the AdWords “landscape” actually look like in 2013? In other words, where are the ads, how many are there, what combinations occur in the “wild”, and how often do they show up? I’ll dive into some details below, but the answer looks something like this (click the image for a full-sized view)…
Embed this image:
The Methodology
We collected data from 10,000 page-one Google SERPs via Google.com on a weekday during normal business hours. Personalization was turned off, and the crawler emulated a logged-out Chrome browser. We parsed the major ad blocks (which have consistent DOM markers) and the links within those blocks. Keywords and categories were pulled from AdWords’ keyword tools, with 500 keywords coming from each of 20 categories.
A Few Caveats
Naturally, keywords pulled from the AdWords’ research tools are more likely to have commercial intent than the “average” keyword (if such a thing exists), so these percentages may not be indicative of the entire world of search queries. We did run these numbers at other time periods and on other days, and the results were fairly consistent.
These statistics were computed by unique queries, not by query volume. The results seem to be very similar, though. For example, we found ads on 85.2% of the queries crawled – if we weight those queries by Google’s “global” volume, we get ad penetration of 84.5%. The correlation between the presence of ads and query volume was virtually non-existent (r=-0.018). The correlation between the presence of ads and Google’s competition metric was high (r=0.874). This is probably not surprising, since “competition” is essentially defined by how many advertisers are vying for any given query.
The Changing Landscape
This is only a snapshot of a rapidly changing picture. For example, paid shopping results are still relatively new, but we discovered them on almost 20% of the queries we crawled. Unlike the traditional AdWords blocks, paid shopping can appear in multiple positions and forms, including the larger, upper-right format previously reserved for Knowledge Graph.
Even traditional top ads are evolving, with ads showing extensions, expanded site-links, lead generation forms, etc. Expect Google to experiment with new formats on the top and right, and to blend advertising into the Knowledge Graph area to increase CTR. This changing landscape will impact the efforts of people in both paid and organic search, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume that this is something only the PPC team has to worry about.
I just wanted to thank Dawn Shepard for all her help putting together the infographic. I know it was probably a bit painful to hear "Make it kind of boring!" ;)
In addition to the data itself, I think my favourite thing about this infographic is its design - very clever layout with where you've positioned the top/side/bottom ad stats, and the title as well.
Agreed - brilliant design!
Thanks - I'm always hesitant about infographics these days (there are just so many), but I really thought it suited the data this time.
That's the thing though - some infographic creators throw a bunch of data together and try and make it pretty. What you've done is incorporated the data into the design and properly given some thought into the layout, making it all the more special. :-)
Hey Dr. Pete
I sat down with a client to look at his site yesterday and a good chunk of the queries we entered resulted in a three big main adverts and a chunk of eight Google shopping link on the right - the offshoot of this was that there was at best a single organic listing on the page for any of his dream keywords.
I am seeing this more and more and without scrolling there can be 15 or so potential distractions for a users before they even consider the organic results. The Google shopping block as well, sits top right, has images for all products and is very attractive - it basically drops people right into what they want straight away via the Google shopping feed.
For me though, this just indicates the importance of good, informational content as if we look at questions about this same product I am talking about we see no top of the adverts and only standard text adverts in the right hand column. Also, no real strong content in the organic results.
So, publishing some content allows us to get to the same audience, but without such brutal ad competition.
Interesting data driven post as ever. :)
Marcus
This is fantastic - sharing immediately. Question: our clients are primarily industrial/B2B manufacturers. Was that category excluded (too small) or would it be bundled with an industry above?
Sorry, your comment got eaten - I think I fixed it. We used the Adwords keyword tool categories, but left out two. In the past, I found the two we left out were just a bit generic. Plus 20 X 500 = 10,000, and I like my numbers to behave themselves.
Thanks for your efforts and sharing its results
"This changing landscape will impact the efforts of people in both paid and organic search, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume that this is something only the PPC team has to worry about."
Sir any prediction about new possible landscape?
Even their new design implementation in search decreased a huge level of traffic through image search.
At initial stage, there was no idea on restricting media partners
(User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow: )
That time I have notice many of my experiment blogs listing in keywords connected with the words contained in google text ads.
I think now it is ok with those restricting command.
Hope its is really useful to prevent the chance of oozing juice through those links in ads.
Any way lot of thanks for sharing this report and for hinting the impact which may affect our efforts.
But there is no drop in earnings Brahmadas, It is true that the new design affected a lot in traffic. Hope Google will change it if they got affected in earnings because they achieves more percentage in Adsense revenue
Awesome! Well done, Dr. Pete.
I'd love to see something comparable to this for SERPs on mobile and ads through Facebook.
"paid shopping can appear in multiple positions and forms, including the larger, upper-right format previously reserved for Knowledge Graph." - Dr. Pete, by tracking or your own intuition, do you have any thoughts on a potential rhyme/reason to positioning of ads as related to a keyword/industry... don't assume there to be such at the moment (likely data gathering/behavior analysis on their part) but curious.. thanks
I didn't really break down paid shopping this time around, and it can be weird. I've seen it in the top ad block, under the block, on the top right, etc., and the format varies quite a bit even within a position. There's a consistent pattern for the top space to bleed into the right or bottom (but not both), but it didn't seem like there was a bias for one area in any given industry.
I do think Google is looking at the ad "real estate" like they do the organic space a bit. For example, if a top ad has expanded site-links, there seems to just be one ad - almost the same logic as a 7-result SERP.
thanks for the reply, Dr. Pete
Hey Anthony
Don't know if you're looking more for ad performance or a blog's performance with that has ads, but I deal with a fair bit of digital display and one tool we've found really, really useful of late is Advisibility from Meetrics. It tracks ad visibility primarily, which you can measure against your projected impressions (69% visibility is a benchmark). Using post-impression and post-click data from Comscore can help measure CPA, but will inevitably reveal which type of ads perform better than others (interestingly, intersitial,those ads before a page loads, perform well in the finance sector).
It's a retrospective look at performance (and it doesn't come cheap), but it's definitely a good way of working out which ads tend to deliver both impression levels and obviously conversions. Not sure much data exists that would let you judge performance before diving in yourself (although it's worth looking at Comscore studies, as they're innovators in the field like SearchMetrics are), although if anyone's interested I can dive into some data about the finance industry when I get the time.
thanks for heads up about, Meetrics, Tom..
Tom wow nice to hear about meetrics
Cool! It's the best Adwords infographics I've ever seen. Thanks for your post.
Thanks Dr.Pete this is the first infographic for Adwords I have seen.
I have a small question regarding "Google's latest updates about Advertorial links". Google is penalizing Advertorial type of links, than what about PPC we are also paying Google to display links in search results.
I have a bit of confusion in this, could you or any of the team specify a little deeply.
Regards,
Raviraj
Pretty soon it's going to be that you have to click on a "organic results" tab in order to see regular listings. "Search Results" will be various types of ads and shopping, trends, and news!
Cool. Now do organic for frequency of universal results!
You mean like...
News: 18.5%
Video: 16.4%
Knowledge Graph: 10.1%
Authorship: 22.7%
? ;)
Are u taking into consideration the query volumes for the keywords?
Those are by unique queries, not query volume. Oddly, I haven't found it to have a huge impact, but my sample is pretty well distributed across query volume.
yeah, probably because you picked all mostly popular keywords heh. (just guessing)
Seriously, those are real numbers from last night.
Hello, PETE
This is unbelievable Infographic posts Design…Thank for sharing you Dr. Pete
This is large information for together PPC and SEO.
Keep in mind that due to the fact the data was collected in February your "Ads by Category" are going to be a bit bloated by seasonal categories such as Home and Garden which is looking at its big advertising months from Feb-June.
I thought jobs and education ads would fare better when put along the other niche like family and community or travel.
I would like to ask a couple of questions if you don't mind.
what was your platform to run more than 10k queries? Any insights on that?
What all things you did in order to refine your data to avoid duplication? Care to elaborate on that as well.
I must say this is a goldmine for seo and ppc experts and very well laid out post with an excellent info graphic.
Though there are so many infographics these days, the design is simple and very appealing.
The crawler platform is entirely custom - it's actually built on the same platform that runs MozCast (https://mozcast.com/). We have a new system in beta and have revamped the back-end quite a bit. This is allowing us to add new data and components in a modular fashion. So, while the core engine has taken dozens (hundreds?) of hours of development, running new experiments is surprisingly easy, and the investment has paid off (I hope).
We winnowed Google's 16K-or-so keywords down to 10K a while back with a lot of trial and error, but ended up with a method that looks something like this:
(1) Picked 20 (out of 22) categories - the two excluded tend to be very generic with a lot of duplication (catch-alls, IMO).
(2) Built an algorithm to do a balanced de-dupe, removing duplicates on a category-by-category basis to end up with 500 non-duplicate entries per category (500 X 20 = 10,000).
(3) Extend the algorithm to keep the sample's "Global" volume (in Google's data) as close as possible to the original data set. This was basically done by a simple decision point - if the total volume of the sample is too low, pick a high-volume keyword. If too high, pick a low-volume one.
We actually tried a lot of variations before we landed on that one.
Thanks to Dr. Pete and to Dawn Shepardfor sharing this visual representation of Google Adwords
This is excellent Adwords Infographics...!!!
Are u able to do this for mobile search?
Theoretically, yes. Let me ponder that.
Thanks for sharing this analysis. This is a nice follow-up to your recent post "How low can #1 go?" We've long expected that Google is trying to coerce all marketers to spend dollars on AdWords. Given how much SERP real estate Google is giving to paid advertisers, PPC is becoming mandatory.
Years ago I read that clicks on organic results used to account for 90%+ of all SERP clicks (about 10% went to paid searches). I wonder how much that's changed. Google already tailors its Shopping results to paid advertisements. How long until page 1 of Google's results is all ads? Someday Google will say, "We still have organic search; you just need to click the tiny link in 6px font that says 'more results...'" :-)
I think we have to be realistic about their motivations and the money involved, but I also think they have a lot of pressure in both directions. If organic search lost its relevance or people didn't trust it, they would eventually leave. So, Google has a difficult balancing act. I think that's why they're dabbling with things like mixing ads in the Knowledge Graph space.
I suspect that one of Google's biggest fears is that people just become blind to their ads. That's all it would take to destroy Google, frankly - if people just got tired of ads and stopped clicking -$50B gone, in a flash. I would bet they have teams of people fighting to find ways to keep that from happening.
I Think Google has embarked on a track of slowly pairing down the free services they offer until it is exactly like you describe. I think it would be great job security for myself as a PPC manager and SEO, but not so good for the Internet users. The web will be like the scene from Futurama with all the Pop-Ups and no content. Perhaps, not this bad but I expect it will happen.
I wonder if there is a person at Google who is analyzing traffic (or part of the Google algorithm) that provides a mathematical equation for when the public will accept a reduction in services (i.e changing search data to not set) without a noticeable downturn in usage?
Very interesting study!
For my own geeky understanding, could you go into more detail on the methodology; specifically around the decisions on how many queries to run to obtain statistical significance?
You mention the study was 10,000 queries total (500 terms from 20 categories each). The latest data I found on total daily queries for Google is 4,717,000,000, so 10,000 and even 500 is more than enough for a confidence level of 99% with an interval between 5-6.
However, I'm wondering if that's enough to really represent the landscape for say, a year, because the terms themselves would shift so greatly. I would imagine the terms you choose were big, head terms, as they would have the most amount of data available, but given what we know about shoppers and what they generally do with head terms (that is, not convert much), would this be a fair representation of the strategy we shoot for both paid and organic search?
Please don't take this as "calling you out," I would never dream of it (respect!). However, I really want to make sure I understand this groundbreaking data further.
Thanks!
Truthfully, the 10K logic in this particular study wasn't quite that scientific. We already have a platform to run 10K queries, and I've been able to easily adapt it, so it works out nicely, even when 10K is overkill. Once you de-dupe and clean up the AdWords data, 10K ends up being a reasonable number to be left with (if you export everything, it's around 16K, but there's a lot of duplication).
I was actually paranoid that the day/night and even weekday differences would be extreme, but I ran this a few times, and didn't find huge variability. Over a year or even a month, though? Yes, I expect we'd see a lot of changes. This is a snapshot in time, and I definitely don't want to imply that it's a static picture or wholly representative of the entire internet.
Great infographic! As the SERPs continue to get more and more messy(less relevent ersults), one thing we have preached to our customers is that they need to get on the Adwords bandwagon. We'll definitely use this infographic as an example in the future.
Hi,
I am the CEO at my company where we offer debt relief services. I have spent about 25% of my time in the marketing department for the last 12 months. While spending my days here, I have made some observations.
I feel others would benefit from these questions as well, so I figured that I would share them here.
Just by looking at this infographic, it is giving me ideas on infographics related to my business. Put it this way, it is a good example of an infographic.
When I first arrived on this page, my first thought was that this page will have a good click through rate, but a short page stay. It probably does have or will have a high return on investment, which is good. Everyone wants to click on the page that says infographic. I am solely speaking my mind.
Let me get to my points here.
I would like to get even more out of this post in regard to Adwords. I wish there were more posts related to Adwords here at SEO Moz.
By the way, SEO Moz is by far my favorite internet marketing site. No other marketing site is transparent like you guys. Most marketing sites online only give you limited information as a way of hooking you to want to buy their services. Obviously they are looking for conversions, but SEO Moz is looking to first help the community, and later get conversions. I love it!
Through extensive conversion rate optimization testing over the last year, my team has found that including a snippet of some type in your Meta description on pages, does help with converting traffic. This includes having a snippet of a video, review or your Google Plus account picture in the Meta area.
I would like to have assistance with setting it up so that in Google Adwords ads, we can also include our Google plus Account, to where in the ads a snippet of our Google plus account will show up.
This should also help with improving our click through ratio on our Adword ads, and would probably also build more trust in the clicks.
Another important aspect of Google Adwords that I would like to hear from you about would be landing pages. With Adwords and at the end of the day, your landing pages are the number one determining factor in regard to how many leads you are getting daily. Everything else can be set up perfect, but then when a user gets to your webpage, if it looks like garbage they will leave.
Our conversion rate in regard to visitors to a web page is about 4%. I would like to see that increase.
I would like to see more posts and tips here at SEO Moz that focus on landing page experience. We always talk about content, but we also need to discuss the trust and cosmetic factors of webpages, in my opinion. Focusing on the user page experience, in order to improve your conversion rate, is needed.
Lastly, on our website we did figure out how to add snippets from reviews onto our blog posts, but we cannot figure out how to add this to our main web pages or to our Adword ads.
We found a wordpress plug in that allows you to add the reviews on blog posts only. Anybody have any ideas on this?
Also, can we add a snippet of our reviews on an Adwords ad? I heard you can.
Over the years we have collected a ton of happy client reviews. We keep copies of all our testimonials from day one, so it will be easy to import them all into one spot. I would think that there is a plugin that handles this.
Please keep me posted if these topics come up.
Wow. This is going to help me a lot in trying to communicate some of these adwords concepts to my colleagues. Thanks a big bunch.
This is an excellent infographic! Very well done.
Awesome infographic Doc! It's a beautiful PPC design and I love that trick :D
Good Work.. Dr.Pete
This is very informative...I love this post.
Hi Dr. Peter! I would have to agree with you that Google’s SERP advertising has a huge impact on the position and effectiveness of organic results. Thank you very much for sharing this Google AdWords Landscape Infographic. I really hope to read more of your articles.
The infographic was great. But even better was the insight that PPC affects SEO. Most people in SEO see PPC as this completely separate thing...even though we both occupy the same Google real estate!
This is great data for both PPC and SEO. Some of the categories surprised me a bit with their percentages.
Could you explain the 0% on the Side + Bottom and Top + Side + Bottom Combinations?
Thanks
-Cuyler
My guess is that Google only wants to limit to two areas of advertising (instead of 3) for fear of being too strong with the ads.
Sorry, I know it's a bit weird to put in "0%" as a data point - I just wanted to show that those combinations never occur in the "wild" (or, at least, in 10,000 queries). I'm not really sure why side+bottom never happen. I suspect the triple-play is out, because, as @Patriot said, it would just seem like overkill. Never say never, though.
Surprised to see only 3.5 ads per page for dining and nightlife - maybe as mobile and location strategies become more prominent with enhanced campaigns this will increase.
This is time to forget about off-page SEO & rankings of keywords. This is time to PAY for to get top rank. Now we are waiting for a new war "PPC WAR".
very informative! love this blog post! :) good job!
The real estate ads consumes is only getting bigger. I foresee a future where there is a gray line between the ad and organic. Just look at Buzzfeed, I can't honestly tell anymore which content is an ad and which isn't. Not saying Google would ever go that route but I wouldn't be surprised to see color scheme changes and more inviting appearances in the future. I don't mind advertising but it's overuse could mislead people like encouraging kids to smoke, or make unfounded health claims.
Wow great work.
Dr. PeteThanks for the post. Do you have any sense of how nonprofit ads figure into the hierarchy of the SERP now that Google updated its practices which indicate that nonprofit ads will show below paid advertisers. I heard this but have seen evidence of them following the practice and of them not. Any insight appreciated.
Quick notes:
I'm surprised travel wasn't listed higher but depending on the number of brand terms in the sample size, that could explain why it came in lower relative to other verticals.
I know hotels and OTAs generally don't bid on each other's brand names (through contracts or informal arrangements) and some of this carries over into the airline sector as well.
I'm surprised law and government was listed as a single category. I don't understand the relationship between a personal injury lawyer and someone looking for the county assessor office.
Those are Google's categories, so I honestly can't speak to the logic of it. We've been using them as a way of breaking out stats in new ways, but there are always queries within any category that look a little odd. True of any categorization scheme, I guess - I used to see this a lot in the directory space.
its really nice one.. thanks Doc
Thanks Dr Pete. As a PPC manager, this is really fascinating stuff.
Pinning this on Pinterest now!
this infographic is so bad-ass that i just wanted to drop another comment to say that again. great work!
interesting & useful - but if you're looking at adwords, serp, & organics, i think you have to include pr in the equation to get a more accurate picture of each piece's impact.
Nice inforgraphic doc...what prog did you make it in?
Adobe Illustrator was used to create the graphic. (er.... I'm 90% certain)
Take a look at this post: 10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations
I agree with Dr. Pete that Google has a delicate balancing act between the PPC and organic results and doesn't want to drive people to Yahoo by providing less than the best organic results but looking at their reported earnings it is easy to understand that it is all about the money. Organic results must remain viable or the money dries up but like someone else stated the landscape on Google has changed over the years and for those competitive keywords the ads are thick.
Don't mind if I do Doc -
your pal
Chenzo