Irish Search Engine Market Statistics

By Michael Finnegan

Until recently, no reliable statistics were available for the search engine market in Ireland. In response to Irish marketer's needs for more relevant and useful statistics, from both a consumer and marketer perspective, research was recently conducted by Amárach Research and E-Consultancy. The findings from both were presented at the second annual Search Marketing World Conference in Dublin on April 3rd.

The Research from Amárach Research focussed on Irish consumer's use of search engines and the findings were presented by Gerard O'Neill, Chairman at Amárach Research. According to the statistics, 83% of Irish adults search everyday with 52% searching several times a day. 96% of all searchers use Google, 24% use Yahoo! and 10% use MSN.
Of those using Google, 67% use Google.ie and 23% use Google.com. Of those using Google.ie, 50% usually select pages from "the web" while 20% search "pages from Ireland".
83% search topics of interest, 43% search work related topics, 43% search on prices while 43% search on topics related to hobbies. Interestingly, 56% of searchers would use a niche search engine for something more specific.
41% of users would mainly click on the top 5 results and 25% would mainly click on results in the first page.
Promisingly, 46% of users consider search results to be "very relevant" with 51% considering them somewhat relevant. Furthermore, 37% of users would trust sponsored listings while 33% would not trust them.
Perhaps the most surprising of the findings is that 55% of respondents would enter web addresses into a search engine as opposed to typing the address into their browser.

The findings from the E-Consultancy research were presented by Caragh McKenna, head of search marketing at ICAN. The results show that 81% of Irish organisations currently invest in search engine marketing. 45% use an agency for sponsored search while 29% use an agency for search engine optimisation. 28% conduct sponsored search in-house while 26% conduct SEO in-house.
On average, organisations spend 40% of their online marketing budget on search engine marketing, 62% of which is spent on paid search and 38% on optimisation.
87% of the budgets in 2007 were spent on search engine marketing within Ireland, 9% in the UK, 2% in the US and 2% elsewhere. 64% expect to increase their paid search spend in the next 12 months while 60% expect to increase their SEO spend.
58% and 64% expect an increase of up to 20% in their paid search and SEO spends respectively.
Not surprisingly, most organisations primary objective in using SEM was lead generation. 38% reported that their main objective for PPC was lead generation while 28% said that this was their primary objective for SEO.
According to the research clicks/visitors was the main method of tracking ROI for 30% of paid search and 29% of SEO.
Just 17% of organisations using PPC tracked their ROI by the number of sales with 11% of those using SEO tracking ROI through sales figures. Not surprisingly then, 49% believed that they were not tracking their ROI for paid search as effectively as they would like (the figure for SEO was 64%).
Finally, 98% of organisations paid to advertise on Google, 38% on Yahoo!, 27% on Live (MSN) and 7% on other engines. In the UK, 86% pay to advertise on Google with 49% paying to advertise on Yahoo!