What's the Value of an Ad on Google's Home Page?

What would you give for one day of Google eyeballs? What would it be worth to you to have one single ad running on Google’s oh so sparse and much hailed homepage? My guess, that for better or worse, many an online marketing department would be more than happy to open up the purse strings for a shot at this opportunity. Funny thing happened back in late October. The first Android phone launched in the form of the T-Mobile G1. In case you weren’t paying attention, this was a big deal for Google no matter how many questions still revolve around Google’s intent. This was such a big deal that Google actually went so far as to provide a link right on the home page for all the world to click.

The real question is whether or not this actually did anything for G1 and T-Mobile in terms of driving traffic. In other words, what was it worth to T-Mobile? The link ran on the Google front page for 7 days from October 22nd through October 29th. During this time the Google front page was visited by nearly 99 million people at an average daily rate of around 38 million per day. How many of these folks were interested enough to forgo their intended search activity and click through on the link?

So what happened?

• Overall the T-Mobile G1 Landing Page associated with the link was visited by over 800,000 people during the 7 day run.
• The peak of traffic came not surprisingly on day one maxing out at about 233,000 unique visitors.
• Google’s volume of clickthrough traffic from the home page peaked on opening day at around 80,000 UVs.
• However, Google’s share of the overall traffic to the site steadily increased from a low of 34% on day 1 to a high of 43% on the day before the shutoff.* Perhaps some repeat exposure impact?

What’s it worth? Well we know one thing for sure it’s worth a lot to Google, then again it is Android and maybe it was just to keep Mr. Ballmer up at night…

*It’s worth noting that on the last day the link disappeared part way through the day so the data for October 29th is a bit skewed

Comments

[Beatle juice 2:]

Sooooo did this article say what an ad on Googles front page was worth???

2008 Nov 19 03:51 PM

[Beatle juice 2:]

Soooo did this article state what the value of an ad on Google's home page was worth????

2008 Nov 19 03:52 PM

[Big Will:]

Seriously though, not even a guess at the value of the ad space? How many of the people who clicked the link actually bought a phone? I am of the opinion that sites exclusively refer to "hits" or "UV's" because any other kind of analysis would undermine the ever-increasing price charged for online advertising. Personally, I have NEVER made a purchase online through an ad. Has anyone else?

2008 Nov 19 05:33 PM

[LarryBlumen:]

Personally, I have never made a purchase through an ad in The New Yorker or The New York Times, either. If I thought the lack of my support was the reason for these venerable rags' struggles, I would buy something.

2008 Nov 20 12:10 PM