Is Google Sending Fewer Clicks To Websites?

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about if Google is actually sending less clicks to websites. So I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but I had a friend, he posted something on LinkedIn. His name is Peter. He's the CEO of Databox. And they compile a lot of data from different companies. And I believe what they do, I'm not even gonna describe what they do, but Databox is a company. So here's what it says. It says, here's Google Search Console trend data over the last six months from 1 ,500 companies. Based on this, I'm wondering if Google Search has been slowly sending websites fewer and fewer clicks over the last six months.

0:35So before we go into this study, Neil, how have you been seeing it with the tools that you have, the products that you have, et cetera? Do you think it's going up or do you think it's going down flat? We haven't really seen it going down much. We haven't seen it going up like crazy. I would say it's more flat to up. And to give you an idea, we have close to a million Google search console or we have data from over a million plus accounts. Right. So arguably you should be posting this on LinkedIn, but let's just work off of this one for now. So I think the natural inclination from marketers is that the behavior is changing.

1:09You have TikTok, you have people searching on Amazon, you have Reddit, ChatJPT. And so what's happening, right? And so he's basically saying that our data doesn't support this theory. In fact, from our sample, median search impressions are actually up. So impressions are actually up, right? Which is just that people are searching Google even more. and he's saying that what's interesting is that there's an opposite trend for the median click through rate over the last six months so the click through rate is going down do you want to explain what that might mean the click through rate meaning someone could end up seeing your listing on google but they may not click through and what he's saying is the average amount of people that are clicking over to listings is going down they're still searching they're just clicking less it could be because they're getting the answer right then and there from google correct and you have sge which is the search generative experience that google is testing right now they're going to continue to refine it.

1:57I believe what they have right now is really, again, just the tip of the iceberg. But I think we're going to see a lot of situations where they just get the answer right there and the click through. So impressions are going to go up, but the click throughs are actually going to continue to go down, but they're going to have to balance that because if they just continue to take the site click throughs down, there's no incentive for people to continue to publish content to be indexed by Google. Yep. So let's take a look at these. What is the, so pretty much saying clicks are going up or no, he's saying impressions are going up, clicks are going down.

2:25Correct. And what's funny is, you know, time will end up telling, but Danny Sullivan, who is Google search liaison ended up posting this a little while back, but he was saying every year since Google's inception, Google has continually driven more traffic to websites than the previous year. And I don't think that's going to change for a while. So no. And what I believe is going to happen is people are going to be like, Oh, as integrated in a search, you're going to get less clicks. Yeah, you can, but they're going to create a better experience that's going to cause more people to search. And overall, you'll still get really healthy amount of traffic from Google.

2:59It's just like when you started searching for what's the weather in Las Vegas, Nevada, you don't have to click on weather.com. Google just shows it to you. And they show it to you for a lot of stuff like definitions and a lot of other things that people used to have to click on websites for. Does it mean that Google's terrible for doing this? As a searcher, forget as a marketer, as a searcher, I prefer this. It makes the experience better on what Google is doing. And it causes me to use it more often. Yep. Final thing here is I remember a couple of years ago, Ran Fishkin, so former founder of Moz, and he has a company called SparkToro now, but he shared the similar web data showing that clickstream data, basically the share of zero click searches.

3:38So people landing on a search engine result page, but not clicking had grown exponentially from 2018 to 2020. So I recommend everyone checking it out because his theory was that that was going to continue to increase. And we're seeing that kind of play out a little more here. But again, incentives have to be aligned. Google makes their money from their ad machine, like most of their revenue from their ad machine. So they're going to make sure they - And to clarify this, it's not they just make the revenue from the ad machine. They also make, I forgot what the, let me see if I can pull it up. They make 30, this is a screenshot from Orbelo.

4:09They took it from status to Google network ads generate$32.78 billion a year in revenue. That's like people putting AdSense on their websites. A lot of these sites generate their traffic through channels like organic social and organic SEO. Yes, it may change for some of these sites, but if they crush it down to zero, that's going to affect their ad revenue. These guys are a publicly traded company. I'm not saying they're not going to do things that could change how much money people make from their websites. They're not just going to be drastic about it and just flip a switch and overnight everything's different.

4:43they're going to be very methodical about it and make sure that they're not ruffling too much fetters all right you guys want to come hang out with neil nine beverly hills august 7th to the 9th that is leveling up.com founders please don't forget to rate if you subscribe when you actually review it helps us more than you would ever know and we would like to shout you out as well so that is it for today and we'll see you later