Search Engines are an incredibly useful way to navigate the web and that’s why they’ve been so integral to our online experience for several decades now.

If you’re old enough to remember life before search engines (like us!) then you’ll remember having to use manually curated website directories and, if you’re lucky, they were ordered into categories!

Slightly younger and you’ll probably remember asking Jeeves all your questions…

Today it’s almost impossible to go a day without using a search engine whether that’s for personal use or as part of your day job.

‘Googling’ is now a recognised word for searching the internet.

The impact of search engines has been far reaching and is also now a multi billion pound business with platforms such as Google Ads contributing the majority of Google’s revenue.

This has also led to many new private search engines popping up, such as DuckDuckGo, that commit to never storing any personal data like Google does and using it to show you targeted ads.

As Search Engine Optimisation experts, we’ve decided to curate the ultimate list of search engine statistics that you need to know about in 2022 to give you an overview of the state of play.

Some are to be expected, such as Google owning 92% of the search engine market worldwide, but some are surprising, some eye-opening and some unbelievable!

So whether you’re reading this for some statistics to use in your own article or presentation, for some insight when you’re planning your companies marketing strategy or just for some light reading, please feel free to share and quote this guide elsewhere.

*This article is regularly updated with the latest search engine stats, make sure to bookmark!

UK Search Engine Stats

In this section we take a look at the state of the UK search engine share, what Brits are searching for, what devices they’re searching on and much more.

• 86% of the UK search engine market share is held by Google, 10% Bing, 2% Yahoo! & 1% DuckDuckGo (Statista.com, 2021)
• 60% of adults in the UK are searching for information, as well as using social networks, online banking, or reading news sites. (Host Reviews, 2019)
• Google sites are most viewed and engaged with by UK audiences on mobile devices. (Host Reviews, 2019)
• Google’s monthly audience in the UK in 2017 was reported as 41.9 million unique monthly visitors in the month of March alone. (Host Reviews, 2019)

“86% of the UK search engine market share is held by Google”

US Search Engine Stats

In this section we take a look at the US search engine market, buying habits amongst Americans and the competition to Google’s throne.

• Google has a 88% market share in the US (Statcounter, 2021)
• 63% of Google’s search engine visits in the US are on mobile (99 Firms, 2021)
• Bing has a market share of 36.96% among US console users. (Backlinko, 2021)
• 10% of Americans own a Google smart speaker (Fit Small Business, 2021)

“63% of Google’s search engine visits in the US are on mobile”

Global Search Engine Stats

Let’s take a look at how search engines rank worldwide, how other countries compare with the UK & US and some global trends to be aware of.

• Nearly 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines. (99 Firms, 2021)
• Google owns 92% of the search engine market worldwide (Statcounter, 2021)
• Bing currently has a 2.71% share of the worldwide search engine market (Backlinko, 2021)
• Globally, Google accounts for 76% and 86% of desktop and mobile search traffic, respectively. (99 Firms, 2021)

“Nearly 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines”

Google Stats

Everyone knows that Google is the daddy when it comes to search engines but how much of the share do they actually have and is this changing in recent years?

• Google owns 92% of the search engine market worldwide (Statcounter, 2021)
• Google processes around 70,000 search queries per second (99 Firms, 2021)
• 5% of all searches have never been searched before on Google (99 Firms, 2021)
• Google takes into account over 200 factors before delivering the best results to its users (99 Firms)

“Google processes around 70,000 search queries per second”

Bing Stats

It’s everyone’s 2nd favourite search engine but exactly how popular is Bing? How do Bing users behaviour differ to that of Google’s? And will they ever be able to compete with Google?

• Bing gets more than 1 billion visits each month (Backlinko, 2021)
• ‘Facebook’ is the most popular search term on Bing US, ‘Google’ is the most popular worldwide (Backlinko, 2021)
• Visitors to the Bing website spend an average of 3 minutes 14 seconds on the site each day. (Alexa, 2021)
• Bing is ranked 35th in global internet engagement as of February 2021. In the US, Bing is ranked 15th. (Alexa, 2021)

“The most popular search term entered into Bing worldwide is ‘Google'”

Search Engine Marketing Stats

With all this website traffic, search engines have become big business. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Pay per Click Advertising (PPC) have become huge industries. Find out some startling stats on search engine marketing below.

• For every £1 that a business spends on Google Search and Ads, it makes £1 in profit. (99 Firms, 2021)
• Microsoft generated $7.74 billion in search advertising revenue in the 2020 fiscal year. (Backlinko, 2021)
• Amazon has 2x more product search volume than Google (Fit Small Business, 2021)
• 81% of people search online for a product or service (Smart Insights, 2020)
• Google Ads is Google’s biggest revenue stream and in 2020 it generated $104 billion making up 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

“81% of people search online for a product or service”

Sources

• https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/280269/market-share-held-by-search-engines-in-the-united-kingdom/
• https://hostreviews.co.uk/google-statistics-uk/
• https://99firms.com/blog/search-engine-statistics/
• https://backlinko.com/bing-users
• https://fitsmallbusiness.com/google-search-statistics/
• https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/
• https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-advertising-business-breakdown-.html

Motorpoint is one of the UK’s leading independent car supermarkets. They typically stock over 5,000 nearly new cars, spanning over 30 trusted manufacturers. Motorpoint has fantastic coverage across the UK, championing 13 dealerships from Glasgow to Chingford.

When we partnered up with their marketing team, we reviewed the account and worked together to determine what improvements and opportunities were available to move the account forward.

Objectives

> Reduce brand search spend

> Reduce CPC

> Improve tracking

> Increase footfall

> Improve location targeting

> Localised branch strategies

> Be more stock focused

At the start of 2019, Motorpoint came to Limelight with various objectives to improve their paid media activity.

One of the main issues that we noticed with the account was that a large percentage of the campaigns were targeting a UK wide audience. This was causing inconsistency with spend allocation and some dealership locations were either getting too much or too little of a share of the overall budget. This also meant that there was money being spent in areas located far away from any dealership. Our work started by reducing all national activity and creating a set of campaigns for every branch and allocating a more even split of the budget.

Brand Search

After analysing the position of Motorpoint’s brand search, we identified a few areas for concern in which we found some opportunities to improve the campaign performance:

• Budgets were too high.
• Campaigns were missing ad extensions.
• Ad copy relevance was poor.
• Location targeting needed to be refocused.
• Manual bidding to be switched to automated bidding.

Results: (2018 Vs. 2019)

> Spend dropped by 79% YoY

> CPC dropped 86% YoY

> Clicks were down 6%

> Cost per Store Visits dropped by 81% YoY

> Cost per Phone Call dropped by 73% YoY

> Cost per Enquiry Form dropped by 90% YoY

Generic Search

We swapped out the national approach to become more tactical with our strategy by localisation and narrowing our focus into the areas surrounding the dealerships. The account became pretty complex after this, multiplying our campaign count by thirteen. However, this allowed us to improve the Paid Search process in the following ways:

> Greater control over dealership budgets

> Increased inventory focus efficiencies

> Branch level strategies

> Branch level reporting

> Branch level footfall data

Expanded Text Ads

This is the standard Ad format recommended for Search. It utilises 3 x Headlines and 2 x Descriptions. Google recommends 2 x variations of this Ad Type to be included in every Ad Group.

Responsive Search Ads

Google recommends having at least one Responsive Search Ad in every ad group. We’ve worked hard to ensure we have these live across the account. You can add up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. The Ad will automatically show different combinations and optimize to show what works the best.

Gallery Ads

We were lucky enough to be granted early access to this new Ad Type. The Gallery Ad allows up to 6 images and slots in below a normal text ad. We’ve seen some really strong Click-Through-Rate & low Cost-Per-Clicks from these ads.

Results: (2018 Vs 2019)

• CPC increased by 22% YoY
• Store Visits increased by 32% YoY
• Calls were up by 9% YoY
• Contact form enquiries up 204% YoY

Display & Remarketing

After reviewing the Display activity that was in place, we identified the following areas of opportunity in order to improve the account:

• New remarketing lists to be created and applied to campaigns.
• Utilise Google’s Automotive In Market Audience lists and apply to campaigns.
• Smart campaigns to be rolled out.
• Location targeting to be refocused.
• Improvement on banners, messaging & localisation.
• Manual bidding to be changed over to automated bidding.

Results: (2018 Vs. 2019)

> Spend was reduced by 18% YoY

> CPC dropped by 53% YoY

> Impressions increased by 10% YoY

> Google Ads clicks increased 74% YoY

Store Visits

Motorpoint is fortunate enough to have the availability of Store Visit data. For companies that have physical stores and are registered on Google My Business, if you link GMB with Google Ads so that we have visibility of what Campaigns, Ad Groups & Keywords are driving footfall. Once an ad is clicked, Google Ads then uses GPS to track a user and report if they visit a dealership.

The national targeting structure that was being utilised when we took on the account made it difficult to see which branches were getting the Store Visits. By splitting the structure into a set of campaigns for each individual branch, it became clearer to see the Store Visit data at branch level. By doing this, it also allowed us to refocus the targeting to areas within a certain distance of each dealership, which boosted Footfall performance. We saw significant YoY increases from March to September:

Inventory Focus

With the nature of Motorpoint’s business, it’s quite important for the paid media to adapt and align with the inventory. Motorpoint sells cars from over 30 manufactures. This means that they often have over 200 models in stock at a given time. We’ve worked to put a system in place that allocates more budget to the models highest in stock in order to optimize our spend accordingly.

YouTube

From the off, we wanted to introduce a stronger, more comprehensive strategy for Motorpoint’s YouTube awareness activity. When we took on the account, they just had one national campaign in play. In the same way that we changed the Search activity, we split this out at branch level and localised the creatives. On the back of this, we saw a huge improvement on the influence YouTube had on Store Visits:

• Spend increased by 485% YoY
• Cost per view increased by 9% YoY
• YouTube Store Visits increased by 4,617% YoY

Smart & Local Campaigns

We were fortunate enough to be granted early access by Google to some new campaign types whilst they were still in beta. It would seem Google is steering businesses towards more automated activity. We’ve implemented these campaign types for Motorpoint and have seen some great results off the back of this.

Local Campaigns

“Local campaigns are designed to use Google advertising to bring business to your shop front. Local campaigns streamline the process for you, making it easy to promote your shops across Google’s largest properties including the Google Search Network, Maps, YouTube and the Google Display Network. Just add a few lines of text, a bid, some assets and the rest is optimised to help your users find you.” - Google Ads

Google Ads Smart Campaigns

“When you sign up for a Smart campaign, you’ll write an ad that describes your business. You’ll also describe your business’s product or service and set a budget. Your ad will automatically show to potential customers across Google Search, Google search partners, Google Maps and the Google Display Network.

Your Smart ad can appear when potential customers in your targeted geographic area search for phrases related to your business on Google or Google Maps. Your ad can also appear for people who are outside of your area, but who include terms related to your business as well as your business location in their searches.” - Google Ads

With new competitors coming into the market, offering services like online car buying and home delivery, it’s a challenging, yet exciting time for the Automotive industry.

For more information on how we can help you with Paid Search Advertising or any other form of Digital Marketing please get in touch, or whilst you’re here, why not read more of our Case Studies?

Over the years, technology has grown leaps and bounds. It’s never been easier to connect with your friends and families during this uncertainty. Skype and Facetime are still popular, however social media is still growing providing new apps specifically designed for video chatting. Leading the way is ‘Houseparty’, a social media platform to connect anyone to their friends.

What is Houseparty?

Unlike its rivals, Houseparty has taken video chatting to a whole new level. Allowing users to simultaneously chat to up to 8 separate friends. Although this might sound chaotic, the app offers a party-like feel by using a split-screen feature, it divides the party into separate real-time boxes.

When released the app promised excellent security features and allows you to choose who you want to talk to, accepting friend requests and user details. Ideal for their target market of teenagers whilst offering reassurance for parents.

The Success of Houseparty

Whilst the whole world is on lockdown communicating digitally has never been more popular. Teenagers can no longer go out and meet their friends so they are finding their way to communicate with their friends using the technology in their hands.

With the advantage of receiving notifications when your friends are online and available to talk. You can choose to enter the conversation when you want or stay out of it completely. It also allows users to play games with their friends enabling them to have more interaction than other online video chat software.

With branded endorsements from Ellen DeGeneres and partnerships with mobile game Head’s Up, Houseparty has grown in success since it’s launch in 2019.

Covid-19 has increased the number of downloads as countries around the world have placed their residents into lockdown so this has become a popular way of people connecting with each other. Google saw a spike around searches at the beginning of March when lockdowns started to take effect.

What Went Wrong?

With millions of users worldwide, keeping users’ identities and credentials safe should have been a high priority but only recently the app has come under scrutiny and rumours of a potential hack. The app has become a viral hit since countries have put residents on a lockdown which includes social distancing and self-isolation, but just recently terrified users are deleting their profiles and the app itself since receiving word of a potential intrusion.

Large numbers of Twitter users are reporting that they’ve had their Spotify, PayPal and bank accounts hacked into since downloading the app.

Epic Games, who created Houseparty, have recently issued a $1 million (£766,000) bounty for the first person who can provide proof of the hack. Epic Games produce many well-known games including Borderlands, Red Dead Redemption and Assassin’s Creed so this is unwanted publicity for them.

Did They Get Hacked?

Although Houseparty users are claiming the hack is real there could be many different reasons which have no connection with the app.

Cybercrime is on the rise especially as hackers are preying on confusion and interest in the coronavirus crisis. It could be possible that the Houseparty users have simply been caught out by another scam.

Social media may also play a role in the mass hysteria here as well.

Hi friends. I was told house party app isn’t trustworthy, my friends mate was hacked so prob best to delete! Just wanted to let ya know!

— Olivia Bowen (@OliviaDBuck) March 30, 2020

Just deleted the House Party app because phones seem to be getting hacked. WHY do ppl have to ruin our fun?????? pic.twitter.com/4uH1pvmUx6

— Lucy Fallon (@lufallon) March 30, 2020

Many users are stating that friends of friends have been hacked which is usually a telltale sign of a hoax. This also helps the topic trend on Twitter which grabs more attention and eventually grabs the attention of the designers. The more people talk the more realistic the hack looks.

So should you delete the app?

Some users are now rushing to delete the app but it could be something as simple as changing to a stronger password and making sure you haven’t used the email you registered in connection with your other accounts.

It’s important to remember that there has been a rise in the number of cybercrime activities directly linked to the increased traffic on social media platforms now that everyone is currently in isolation.

It’s always important to stay safe online no matter what app you’re using. If you think one of your apps is in danger of being hacked then it might be time to change your password.

When it comes to social media there are so many ideas and techniques out there to help your brand perform better. From post formatting to frequency and timing, there seems to be a lot of technicalities to social media marketing today.

Amongst all of these techniques it is important not to forget the main purpose of social media; to connect and engage with your customers. This is what makes your social media voice so important. In this post, we will explore how to establish an effective voice for your brand, and how you can use this to improve your social media strategy and increase engagement.

Think of your brand as if it were a person:

Don’t you hate it when you phone a call centre and you’re greeted by a lengthy automated voice message? Or those irritating automated marketing calls? People like talking to other people, not computers or robots, and this rule also applies when it comes to social media. Giving your brand an identity will make your audience feel more comfortable, meaning they are more likely to interact.

In order to humanise your brand, you can begin by asking yourself some questions about the kind of person it would be. The more detailed your brand persona is the better, but below are some questions to get you started:

• What kind of personality would they have? (Try choosing your 3 most important personality traits)
• What tone of voice would they use? (E.g. Friendly, authoritative, funny, casual, serious etc.)
• What kind of relationship would they have with your audience? (E.g. Friend, coach, an inspiration/someone to aspire to, colleague etc.)
• Who would be your brand’s celebrity mascot/s? (This is a good way of further visualising the persona of your brand and how you would like to be perceived)

Once you have developed a clear persona for your brand you should visualise this character in all of your social media posts. If it doesn’t fit the character, then don’t make the post!

Give people a reason to follow your brand:

People are constantly being marketed to, but they certainly don’t use social media just to look at ads. Competition is fierce, so you need to give consumers a reason to follow or like your page. Many businesses make the mistake of being overly promotional on social media, with profiles that look something like this:

Looking from an audience member’s perspective, would you really be interested in following a brand that constantly made posts like this? Probably not, right? Of course, it is fine to post some promotional content; just make sure it is relevant, not too sales-heavy, and most importantly is of interest to your audience. One brand that does this particularly well is Innocent. Their light-hearted and humorous tone is projected in all of their posts, even promotional:

We’ve made a TikTok account but no one believes it’s really us. It definitely is though. Pretty sure, anyway. Like, 80% sure. https://t.co/2ZXHOcsJUH pic.twitter.com/qk3Von3ZUf

— innocent drinks (@innocent) April 30, 2021

In a case study interview with The Drum, Innocent Drinks social media team broke down how they promote their brand on social media:

Our team is split between ‘One To Many’, and ‘One To One’. ‘One To Many’ is our content creation – they’re the ones who get all the glory. ‘One To One’ covers our responses across social – both solving customer service queries and having a fun chat with the people who buy our stuff.

We actually have a very in-depth strategy: chat nonsense all day. (…) it’s our day-to-day stuff – making consistently great posts that our core audience love. We don’t crowbar sales messages into every tweet. (…) We constantly reply to people. We try to have one-to-one interactions so good that they become one-to-many by writing replies that people want to share.

Your audience wants to feel like they matter, so be polite and make sure you respond to any interactions. Competitions are another great way of giving value to your audience whilst boosting engagement and expanding your social media presence.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes:

You should already be aware of your business’s target audience and their interests, so the next step is to cater your social media content towards these interests. Make the most of analytics tools to see which posts your audience responds best to and tailor your future posts around this data.

Remember that social media is all about conversation, so give your audience something to talk about. Ask questions and encourage interactions – just one person talking positively about your brand can reach a multitude of potential new customers.

When posting content on social media your brand identity and consumer profiles should always be at the forefront of your mind.

Concluding thoughts:

Your social media voice may seem trivial at first, but getting it right truly can make such a difference for your brand. Having a consistent and authentic voice allows your audience to really connect with your brand; they should almost feel like they know your brand as a person and will, therefore, be able to interact with you in that way. Engagement is key when it comes to social media success, so having an audience base that is willing to interact with your brand is invaluable.

Remember that building a recognisable social media presence will take time; so be patient, keep things consistent, let your personality shine through, and you’ll soon start seeing the rewards.

If you would like any further advice around finding your social media voice, or anything else related to social media management then please get in touch and we’d be happy to help.