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The Search Opportunity Tutorial

Welcome to the second lesson ‘The Search Opportunity’ of PPC Advertising Tutorial which is a part of Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) Certification Course offered by SimpliLearn.

In this lesson, we're going to look at media consumption, where time is spent and the big numbers involved with the search. Let us first look at the objectives of this lesson.


After completing this tutorial, you will learn:

  • Who relies on the Internet for research

  • Where people spend their time online

  • The correlation between user attention and ppc advertising spend

  • How consumer control continues to change

Let us now understand why the web is so essential.

Why Is Web essential?

The web has become an essential part of our daily lives. It is common to see web use grow more than five billion hours year after year. That's the same as one person being online for three million consecutive years.

In fact, we've become completely reliant on the web. Majority of people say that not having access to the web would disrupt their daily routine because we use the web daily.

Media Consumption Per Day

We examine media consumption of individuals. You see that TV and videos watched a little over three hours a day. Music and radio, an hour and a half a day. Mobile phones, another hour or so a day. People game another half an hour a day. They read less than 24 minutes offline.


Online media consumptions are more than four hours per day. It's higher than any other major media type. However, there's a new breed of consumers growing up who don't just use one media type at a time.

Children about 8 to 18-year-olds spend 25% of their media time using multiple media at once. They're watching a TV show while using a cell phone. They're on the computer while texting. They're watching TV and using a computer at the same time, and these are the common behaviors.

24% of 12 to 18-year-olds use another media most of the time when watching TV. So another reason online consumption is growing so much is we can interact online, either it's a computer or a cell phone while watching TV or listening to the radio. I

World Wide Trend - Not Just US

The growing trend to use the Internet more and more is not limited to a single country. Most countries are seeing growing usage of the web and some of the most common reasons we use the web is, it saves our time.

This could be from researching your products to finding information, and other uses.

Let us look at the benefits of the internet in the next chart.


The Internet helps keep me connected to family and friends. Well, this explains the large growth of the social networking site. The last reason people like to use the web is that it helps them make better decisions.

The web has replaced our traditional means of information retrieval, the yellow pages, newspaper, radio, trade magazines. And other media types are not being completely displaced by the web.

Those media forms are also placed in their content on the web, which makes it more searchable and easier to find than traditional paper format. That you can do paid search or PPC advertising on newspaper sites.

So newspapers and yellow pages aren't going away. They're being transformed to a different media format.

C-Level executives use the Web

It's not traditional consumers we're moving online. C-Level executives and decision makers also rely on the web. Forbes, which is a big magazine dedicated to serving business individuals, surveyed C-Level executives.

What they found is:

  • The Internet continues to be the most influential and important source of business information around the world.

  • Before starting the work day, C-Level executives prefer to access the web rather than read a newspaper.

  • Seven out of ten executives believe the web is the most important source of information.

  • C-Level executives consume media on the web more than any other medium. They use the Web more than TV, radio, print.

  • C-Level executives use online media more than the average consumer.

C-Level trusts Internet above work contacts

What's amazing among this Forbes study is that C level executives trust the internet more than their networks of individuals. Also, executives aren't giving up traditional print media; they're consuming it online.

70% percent of executives say when they consume traditional media they do so via the web instead of print. So this trend goes beyond print to include traditional media broadcasts such as tv and radio.

The world hasn't stopped consuming traditional media. We've just changed where we consume it.

How much do you trust the web?

This is also from the Forbes digital study. When you look at the results below, you see a large dichotomy based upon age ranges.

  • Under 50, trusts the web a whole lot. They trust paid listings 72%. They occasionally or frequently click on these ads.

  • Over 50 plus 33%. Trusting banner ads, 65%. Under 50 said they trust them, 50 plus, not nearly as much clicking on these ads.

You can put PPC ads as a banner or static ad on other websites. So page search does go beyond just search formats to reach in other formats where the content is trusted by executives and decision makers.

Let us now look at where time is spent online.

Online Activities by time

Search only makes about 3.5% of time spent online. It's increased a little bit year over year, but it's not a huge amount of time spent on search, as opposed to social networks, online games, email, so forth.

However, a search is the second most common online activity that people do. In fact, there are more than 100 billion searches per month worldwide. Google processes about 88 billion queries per month. Baidu, eBay, Bing, Yahoo are also processing search queries.

This makes a huge amount of search inventory.

The following image shows the global share of searches.


In North America, it's about 22% of all searches. But even when you leave North America, Europe's 32% of the searches. Asia's 30% of the searches. There are searches everywhere.

When you look at the penetration of searches though, North America's online population is about 270 million people. That's not total population, that's online population. It's about 14% of the world's Internet population.

However, they do connect 22% of searches, so a very engaged population. Europe, their Internet population's about 500 million people. That's about 24% of the world population. They connect 30% of searches, so again, a very engaged population.

Asia's 30% of the total search query. It's a larger percentage of the population though. So in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the online search queries don't match the population. Europe, North America, online search activity is higher than population equivalence.

Google dominates the US search market share. In fact, Google dominates global search share. There are some countries they're not the dominant player in. But when you look overall at total search queries, Google is by far the dominant player.

The following graph explains the Search Engine Market Share by the United States


Now the biggest exceptions would be Russia where you have Yandex, China where there's Baidu. So there are exceptions to that rule. But generally, when you want to advertise online, Google is a place to put your ads.

Let us now look at the worldwide ppc advertising revenue.

World Wide PPC Advertising Revenue

-Charts world-wide-advertising-revenue

We see that online activity in 2009 was about 12%, ppc advertising offline about 88%. It's projected by 2014 that online will only comprise 17% of the total spent. In fact, some people think online spends even smaller in their projections.

Note: The data shown in the above graph is from 2014. However, this is 2018, and we have only seen an upward growth in this.

Given below is the Share of an ad spending by medium


Media Consumption Trends

When we look at media consumption trends over the past century, we see is that is when the Internet was invented, its Internet usage spiked very, very quickly as a higher growth projection than any other media type.


In the next section, we will try to understand why user attention is not always equal to ppc advertising spend.

User Attention does not equal PPC Advertising Spend

If we look at media consumption, the average person spends 13 hours a day, consuming some media and advertisers spend up to $465 billion in ppc advertising those 13 hours a day.

Let’s look at the difference between spent and media consumption.

Media Consumption

Total US PPC Advertising Spend

41% of the time is spent online

11.9% of spend is online

59% of the time is spent offline

88.1% of the time is spent offline

Let us now take a look at what happens when consumers take the control over media.

Consumers  Are Now In Control

This is something that advertisers are still trying to deal with. So, first we had a TV, and we were forced to watch a channel. Then we got a remote control so we could switch channels during commercials and then came Tivo and can just fast forward through commercials.

However it's not ending at commercials, it's now that we can record our content and watch it whenever we feel like. Then we had big cable companies.

Big cable companies came along and told us what we could watch. And then, we had Netflix on demand. Watch whatever you want, whenever you want.

Back in 2000, AOL released AOL 6. You had to view the AOL home page. The browser didn't have a homepage button. Your homepage is AOL.

Now most people's homepage, Google, it's a blank page, it starts with a search box. Consumers can decide what they want to do today. Consumers have taken control, and this is where advertisers still trying to adapt to consumers.

It's why if you target consumers based upon what they're trying to accomplish, their user behavior, search queries, pages they're on, topics they're interested in.

Consumers maintain their control and your ads are relevant to what the consumer wishes to do right now. That's a good combination.

In the following section, we'll look at the SEM spend projections.

SEM Spend Projections

The following graph shows a forecast for US search marketing spend from 2009 to 2014


You see paid search it's just going to up and up and up. Even though the data shown in the graph is from 2014, it's just going to increase over the next several years.

So putting your money in paid search, selling paid search if you want to be an agency, managing paid search if you want to work for a company, pretty much any career in paid search, it's a solid career choice.

Given below is the data for US internet time spent in the most heavily used sectors into one hour.


Now when you look at paid search, the ad spend, it's pretty low. Overall, it's going to increase a lot, but it's. Still, the online total is 4% is spent. Only 3.5% of our time is spent on search pages.

So why do we talk about paid search so much?

It's a few reasons. One, lead cost. It's estimated lead cost is below your average for 74% of companies. If you look at PPC advertising, in general, it's $8.50 a lead, Yellow pages $20 a lead and Direct mail, $70 lead.

Note: This was for non-targeted emails, not internal email lists.

Email is a good method of PPC advertising. So, search engines help you find information when you know what you're looking for, they help you discover new products when you're looking for something new.

They're a good place to get our information from. It's still a small percentage of spend; this is your opportunity.


With this, we come to an end to what this search opportunity tutorial is about. In the next lesson, we will look at The Buying Cycle and see how it applies to search

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