So who exactly is filling Google’s ever growing vaults?
It seems that perhaps as much as half the magic that is Google can be distilled down to boring old insurance, loans, and mortgages. These categories of keywords, if the analysis of Wordstream below is accurate, account for approximately 46% of Google’s ad revenue over the last four quarters, or a whopping $14.8 billion for these three categories alone.
As a caveat, I am not exactly sure what the percentages in the graphic below stand for (i.e., is it % of search volume), so it’s possible that this number overstates or perhaps understates the revenue from these three categories. For one thing, it’s not clear how display advertising is accounted for. In any event, whatever the number is, it appears both significant as a percentage of total revenue and absolute dollars.
As Willy Sutton said “Go where the money is.” According to these numbers, Twitter, Facebook, and every other startup looking for an advertising-based business model for their own oceans of gold should be sending every free hand that they can find to knock on the doors of advertisers in the insurance, loans, and mortgages spaces.
