24 Hours in the Google Economy – 2012 Stats [Infographic]

$100 Million bucks in 24hrs. Well good for you Google. #golfclap

It’s a shame most people don’t know how to use AdWords properly, and just waste those $100 coupons they keep being given. The first one’s free – right, where have we heard that before?

Google slaps and drug dealer references aside, this infographic has more stats than a bored baseball commentator. Luckily for us, Wordstream have very kindly broken it down by the 10 industry verticals spending the most on paid search and banner ads. And because I like to make life hard for myself, I’m going to dissect the economics of Google’s giant daily pile of cash into something a little more digestible.

Paid Search vs. Display Network

I’ll kick things off by comparing their paid search ads against their banner (display) network. While there are more than 4x the number of banner impressions vs. paid search, the reverse is true for daily clicks, with paid search ads getting clicked on 4x as often. This tells me that text search ads are seen as more trustworthy and relevant, while the display network is still suffering from banner blindness and has to serve up way more impressions to be relevant.

Working in a conversion-centric business, it’s the conversions stat that are most interesting to me: there are 5x more conversions on paid search vs. banners. I know where I’d spend my money.

Retargeting
It’d be interesting to see how retargeting performs compares to paid search and display, now that it’s becoming a more mature service.

The Top Industries Filling Google’s Pockets

Rather than just regurgitating what’s written below, for this section, I’ll go the sports route and show how each industry vertical compares in a standings format. Note, this is for paid search only – I’m turning a blind eye to the banners.

So what did you learn? Personally, I’m not going to sleep tonight after reading all these stats. Enjoy the infographic. And don’t miss out on the Tweetable stats at the end of the post so you can share your new knowledge.

Note: Due to an issue with the creator of the infographic and changes to Google’s API, some of the stats on the graphic were not 100% accurate. As such the infographic has been removed from circulation. I’d like to apologize for anyone visiting this post now, not getting to see what was an really great piece of work.

— Oli Gardner