The end of the Super Bowl brought broken hearts to New England and elation to New York (and many other places). But it also brings the competition for some of the world’s biggest brands to capitalize on the record-setting price they paid for Super Bowl commercials. With prices reaching up to $3 million for a 30-second spot, which advertisers got the most for their money by connecting their ads to their online presence in search and social media? Check out Reprise Media’s Super Bowl scorecard to see which companies scored and which ones choked.

Compete and Reprise have been able to see past the Boston-New York rivalry and come together for a partnership to analyze data on user behavior and online traffic trends surrounding the Super Bowl. Compete will be collaborating with reprise on study later this month to understand the best and worst of online/offline advertising coordination. Check back towards the end of February to download the study.

Back in November you may recall we saw a pretty substantial uptick in the overall volume of searches being performed in the market. It appears that holiday driven growth slowed in December as the overall volume of searches in the marketplace was essentially unchanged in December. The US online population posted roughly 8.2 billion search queries in the final month of 2007. In general the status quo seen in the overall market was reflected in the individual performance of the major players.

Google continued its climb towards the stratosphere capturing 68% of all search queries in the US. Yahoo! stemmed the receding tide a bit but still lost a marginal amount of market share on slight volume declines. Unfortunately for Yahoo! the continued slide, albeit small, pushed them to a new low for market share. MSN/Live continued the good fight in December and actually outpaced Google with respect to percentage gains in volume. Year-over-year, MSN/Live total search volume was up nearly 40%. Ask held the dubious title of posting the largest overall decline in search volume in December. Although a 5% month-over-month decline in search volume after a substantial increase is hardly anything new to Ask. Despite the roller coaster ride, year-over-year Ask volume was up nearly 31%. Unfortunately, when you’re the little guy you need astronomical gains to make real headway. Market share for Ask was essentially unchanged from December 2006. Last but not least, AOL had the largest percentage gains in volume month-over-month with a gain of 5.5%. Despite year-over-year volume gains, AOL hasn’t been able to keep pace with the market and has lost market share from December 2006.

The recap …

• Despite “laws of big numbers,” Google volume and market share continue to climb to new record levels
• Yahoo! volume and market share decreased, but the descent did slow a bit
• MSN/Live market share inched up slightly with the largest overall volume gains
• Ask market share and search volume continued on the roller coaster with a decline in December
• AOL volume increased substantially and managed to squeak out a minor gain in market share

Footnote for December search share release:

A few months back we saw a pretty substantial drop in AOL searches and were a little concerned something might be up. Well we finally figured out what was going on and have adjusted our search share calculations accordingly. The good news is that AOL reporting is back on the table as you can see. The bad news is we had to adjust our market share numbers for some prior months. The trends and the volume estimates are still the same we just had to slightly adjust everyone downward to account for AOL. As a result, along with the standard data we publish, we’re providing you with all of the adjusted numbers for the months affected.

* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

If there was any doubt that search is still on the rise November should put that to rest. November brought us a number of firsts in the search world. Overall the US online population posted a new record for the number search queries performed on the top engines with over 8.1 billion. That’s roughly 48 monthly searches per person on average! And it’s 12 more (+34%) monthly searches than the 36 per month that Compete estimated for November 2006. Oddly enough the rising tide managed to lift the biggest fish in the pond.

Google market share increased to a record 69% of search queries in November on volume gains of 2.5%. That puts market share nearly 10ppts higher with close to 2 billion more queries than the same month last year. Meanwhile MSN/Live held steady, slightly above year ago market share levels. Ask also held steady month-over-month but remained slightly below last November’s market share levels. Yahoo! managed to capture the distinct honor of being the only one of the top players with lower year-over-year query volumes. In fact web search queries on Yahoo! were down 10% from November 2006 despite the huge market gains. The continued losses pushed Yahoo! market share to a record low in November.

The recap …

• Google volume and market share increased to record levels … again
• Yahoo! volume and market share decreased to a new low … again
• MSN/Live market share held steady on slight volume gains … again
• Ask market share held on to last month’s gains but didn’t move any higher
• 8.1 billion served, that’s a lot of questions … no wonder Jeeves went into retirement.

*Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

I’m not sure if this is consistent in every market, but here in Boston, IAC has been beating the Ask advertising drum like crazy. It seems like everywhere I turn the channel these days I come across the latest “Can your search engine do this?” campaign. The media spend numbers aren’t available yet, but my guess is IAC spent a bundle in October taking a not so subtle knock at the mighty Google. As a result it appears Ask has fired up the market share roller coaster again. For those of you watching, you may recall that this is familiar territory for Ask. It’s a bit strange that IAC waited this long to kick in the media engine. You may recall that Ask 3D (the new search results layout) launched back on June 4th. Perhaps with IAC breakup will allow them to focus their attention moving forward.

Search queries on Ask increased a full 14% from September levels, pushing market share back up to nearly 4%. This was the second straight month of gains for the #4 engine. October’s gains pushed Ask to within striking distance of year-ago market share levels. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

In other news, MSN/Live managed to hold steady in October with search queries increasing in lock step with the market. MSN/Live has managed to hold market share levels above that of last year for several months now following the launch of Club Live. As a reminder, our Live search market share does not include Club Live queries. Any gains on Live search we are showing are organic growth that might be attributed to the Club Live campaign.

Yahoo! had another tough month with market share dipping to the lowest level yet on a 2% decline in query volume. In the past year Yahoo! web search has lost a full 11.5 points in market share … ouch.

Oh and Google search volume and market share reached record levels.

The recap …

• Google volume and market share increased to record levels … again
• Yahoo! lost market share on a decrease in search query volume
• MSN/Live market share held steady despite small volume gains
• Ask market share increased on substantial volume gains
• My search engine may not be able to do this, but it can do this

*Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

For the past few weeks I’ve been peeling back the layers on the search onion to understand a few questions. How effective are each of the engines? How do people use search? Who is using search? I’ve shared a few tidbits of these musings on the blog including a post on “search fulfillment” that raised a few hackles and more recently a post on “navigational search.” In the interest of peeling back another layer in the continuing quest I thought I’d look into exactly who is performing the highest volume of searches on each engine. The beauty of Compete’s people based approach to click stream data is that I can dig into this question without having to worry about things like bots, meta-search, etc. Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person.

To start I decided to take a look at the overall search query landscape with respect to volumes of queries performed by the US online population. As we are all well aware the online world is littered with examples of the now infamous “long tail.” Search query volumes are no exception.

We ranked individual searchers by the volume of queries performed in a given month and then aggregate their searches into percentiles. What you find is that the top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month. If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%. So in contrast to the standard 80-20 pareto it appears that in web search there is roughly a 70-20 distribution. So what if we break this out by engine?

It appears that high volume Google users are the least concentrated with the broadest distribution as compared to Yahoo! and MSN/Live. 70% of search queries in September were performed by 20% of Google searchers. For Yahoo! the concentration increased to 73% and for MSN/Live searchers 75% of the queries were performed by the top 20%.
Next question … are these high volume searchers the same every month or is there some churn amongst these top searchers?

From this perspective the chart flips, with Google showing the highest concentration of top 20th percentile searchers returning to the top tier in a subsequent month. Yahoo! had roughly 58% of top tier August searchers returning in September. MSN/Live saw only about 52% of the top tier returning. I’m curious about how this looks over the course of a longer period. Do the same 52% to 60% of people continually perform the lion share of searches on the top engines or is there some trend in the data? Does seasonality play a role? So many questions … perhaps for another post.

A few weeks ago I pulled together a quick post that I didn’t think was going to make much of a splash. As it turned out my quick and dirty analysis on “search fulfillment” got a lot of people thinking and asking questions. All those great questions sparked some additional thoughts. The main question that came to mind is specifically how the top search engines differ with respect to how they are predominantly used. For instance, perhaps navigational search can explain some of the difference in search fulfillment.

By navigational search I am referring to searches where someone is trying to get to a specific site by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it. For instance someone might search for Amazon, amazon.com, or even www.amazon.com to get to Amazon’s website. It’s actually astonishing how often people search for the complete web address and click on the corresponding search result to get to the site they are trying to navigate to. It makes me laugh every time I see my parents do this, but even more amazing is when the “web savvy” amongst us does this.

Almost nine times out of ten when I’m looking at referring search terms the first term on the list is some variation of the domain name. In some sense these navigational searches could represent “non-monetizable” searches for the engines. People searching these navigational terms and ending up at the matching domain are by definition trying to get somewhere very specific. It’s going to be hard to get these searchers to go somewhere other than their intended destination, no matter how high your PPC budget happens to be.

Navigational searches as a percentage of total searches are amazingly consistent month-over-month. On average navigational search is about 17% of all search traffic on the top three engines and this varies little over the course of the year. There is however, significant variation from engine to engine. While Yahoo! and MSN/Live searches are typically between 27% and 28% navigational, Google searches are only about 14% navigational.

I’d be curious if anyone has any thoughts about why Google has significantly fewer navigational searches (percentagewise) than the other two top engines. Perhaps my mom is a Yahoo! or Live Search user … I’ll have to ask sometime.