Method for defining current market shares taken by search engines in various countries using online services

Purpose:

● analyzing those regions where Google is not a single dominating search engine;

● explaining the customer why the promotion quotation contains certain search engines;

● creating a better customer experience thus increasing the customer loyalty.

The latter point shall be considered in detail. As a rule, SEO customer loyalty is not directly and unambiguously connected with the promotion results. The customer is not a SEO specialist and thus cannot see a clear correlation between the website promotion cost and the results obtained. That is why, from time to time, every customer may think another optimizer will either achieve better results at the same cost or reduce the costs while maintaining the results achieved. Therefore, since the early stages of customer interaction a SEO company shall demonstrate its professional skills; relevant graphs of market shares taken by search engines in your customer’s region can become a small but important block to build the SEO company credibility.

The evaluation mechanism:

Obviously, the search engine market shares in the region can be analyzed by:

● the number of search queries from the target region per each search engine;

● the number of unique users from the target region referred from each search engine;

● the number of user click-throughs from each search engine in the target region;

The number of search queries is a metric available only for the search engines as using the external services we are not able to define the number of users sending a query. Thus, we have only two points to be analyzed. Some online services register the number of unique users, and some of them consider the number of click-throughs. More accurate data can be obtained by click-through counting as the switched off cookies and dynamic IP use result in the errors in defining the unique user number.

It is not correct to evaluate the market shares by the number of referrals to the websites from the target region search engines as the numbers can be mixed with a large number of users from other regions who go to the websites oriented towards the global audience. However, the correct evaluation requires a large sampling ensured by the service counters which most of the target region sites have. The number of such sites is a key criterion during the service change.

The most popular services:

1. StatCounter

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/

The largest web analytics service used to monitor more than 1.5 million sites all over the world. To build statistics, the service counts the number of referrals from search engines. As of July 2022, the sampling included 885 million of referrals from search engines with 142 million of them from the USA. Apart from the region one may choose the platform for the analysis. The interface is user-friendly, the result is shown in the form of a graph. The service is free, no registration is required. The results are unloaded in csv.

2. LiveInternet

https://www.liveinternet.ru/rating/ru/

A leading service of Internet source statistics at the former Soviet area, a total of 574 websites have counters in place. To build a necessary graph, first select the country and then move to the group statistics; click “from the search engines” in the left menu and set the relevant search engines. The service is free, no registration is required. The results are unloaded in csv.

1. SimilarWeb

https://www.similarweb.com/engines/

A large American service of web-statistics. The developers claim that the counters Similarweb are installed at millions of websites. The service doesn’t specify whether the unique users or referrals are counted; however, it seems that these are unique users. For defining the user’s geographical location, the system uses not only IP addresses but also networks, device codes, etc. The interface is user-friendly, the result is shown in the form of a graph. The service is free, no registration is required. The results are unloaded in csv.

Which web statistics system is better:

To get a more accurate result, choose the service with the largest number of counters in the target region: the higher is the statistics, the more accurate result you obtain. Also, one should take into account the linguistic factor as three graphs above show the search engine shares in the USA at the same time; however, the graph by LiveInternet shows that Yandex outruns Bing ranking the second after Google. The point is that the counter of the Russian-speaking service is generally installed on the websites having the content in Russian, and such content is searched for by the Americans via Yandex rather than Bing. Hence, the error occurs. Still, any of these options may provide approximate results suitable for understanding the trends in the target region and sending to the customer as part of quotation.

Google rivals

There are regions where Google is not a monopolistic search engine. First of all, this is China where the main search engine is Baidu while Google even lags behind Bing. However, the share of Baidu has been dramatically decreasing for the recent year against the growth of Sogou and Haosou shares.

Secondly, this is South Korea where a significant market share is taken by Naver. Notably, the share of Naver is larger in the mobile devices’ sector. Most likely it is explained by the fact South Korea is one of the leaders in manufacturing smartphones with a pre-installed search engine. According to Tadviser, as of 2014 Naver processed 70% of all web queries in South Korea surpassing Google. StatCounter shows a slight dominance of Google over other search engines. This information is either outdated or we face the aforementioned linguistic error. By the way, we were not able to check the statistics with LiveInternet as this service does not know about Naver.

Thirdly, Japan. Here the share of Google is stable and a bit less than 80%. Main rivals are Yahoo! and Bing having a significant market share.

As for European countries, one can think of Czech Republic with a remarkably large market share (more than 10%) is historically taken by the national search engine Seznam.

Conclusion

Online services allow evaluating the current market share occupied by search engines for a target country. However, bear in mind that the result will be based on the data available to this service and may not reveal the actual market situation. For the accurate interpretation of the results, it is recommended to apply a critical approach and take into account local market detail.