60% of people do not know how ranking on Google works
In the past few days we talked about how and how much the evolution of Google SERPs is affecting our habits, especially in the new way we look at and interact with search results (the so-called “pinball pattern“), and how fundamental it is for the sites to face this reality. But there is also another issue to address: people not always understand what ranking means.
Little awareness of SERPs and clicks on ads
To be precise, as a survey carried out in the US by Brand Verity reveals, 63% of consumers do not have any awareness of how placement on Google works how results are actually categorized. In particular, the share of users perceiving ADS as organic results is very high, therefore clicking on the absolute first link they see on the page.
Study on consumer experience in the United States
Brand Verity is a company specialized in online brand protection that entrusted to an external firm a research on a sample of over a thousand american consumers, properly profiled, with the goal of providing Brands of a better understanding of online research experiences that their clients live during the holidays and, moreover, how these impact on the brand perception.
The ranking of the results is not that clear to users
The most blatant data is the one related to SERP awareness: as anticipated, only the 37% of consumers understand that search engine results are sorted out based on a combination of relevance and ads investment.
The remaining 63% of people thinks that search engine result pages are ranked based on relevance or the investment, or simply admit to “not really know”. Furthermore, almost 1 user out of 3 (31%) claims to think that search engines such as Google are not doing a good job in marking which link is advertisement.
Confusion leads to unaware clicks on ads
A confusion that obviously also affects clicks: by not having a clear grasp of ranking, consumers are more prone to click on the first appearing result on SERP, automatically deeming it as the most relevant.
A factor piling up on another piece of data: 54% of people claim to better trust Web sites placed on the top part of the SERP. Therefore, according to these numbers, most part of people searching on Google stop at the first available result often unaware of the fact that he is clicking on an advert.
The need to defend one’s personal brand and business
This indication are valuable to brand protection, because “bad actor” competitor advertisers could exploit the consumers’ obliviousness about how search results work to their own gain. For instance, the study comments, “competitors may bid for a brand’s keywords and even rank right on top of the Brand’s web site itself, luring clueless clients“.
Benefits for competitors exploiting users’ confusion
Not very an unusual situation, according to Brand Verity, that found out ““.
It does not seem a coincidence that 51% of consumers say to feel misled by at least one of the Web sites among search results whenever looking for info on a product, with 1-in-4 claiming to feel this unpleasant perception “often” or even “always”. Furthermore, the same ratio also say that “by clicking on a search result they ended up somewhere unexpected “.
Amazon overcomes Google on branded product researches
There is then a further element very useful to whoever works to the SEO of eCommerces and such: Google is not the main and first focal point for product searches anymore, because the competition with Amazon that overturned values.
To the question “where does your search for a specific branded product start?” (such as Nike shoes), 56% of those questioned actually answered Amazon, with a 30% of people turning to Google and only the 9% that instead go directly on the brand’s web site. The search engine, though, still owns his predominance for more generical and not-branded researches: when users search for “items without a specific brand in mind”, 52% of people start from Google and 37% from Amazon, while a small 5% use other search engines.
Google still is pivotal to get visbility among consumers
Useful news to whoever is currently planning strategies in order to optimize a brand’s visibility, to which we can add a further detail: during the peak of the holiday season’s shopping the 65% of american performs a noticeable number of online searches before actually buy something, and so is quite clear that Google still is a touchstone in discovering products. resta ancora il riferimento principale per far scoprire prodotti. Not to mention the fact that it is going to also start at full capacity the new Google Shopping system, that could strike back Amazon’s attack and restore the old hierarchies for branded searches as well.
