I love Business 2.0 and their blog, but today’s post about Google by Erick Schonfeld is an example of questionable statistics. My first reaction when I saw the graph on a right is how it is possible that Google Map’s market share is 0.82% - numbers seemed pretty low. When you read the comments you understand that the numbers are not actually “market share” is a percentage from all visitors who visit Google. Ok this could be just a terminology mistake, but in comments Erick argues that it doesn’t matter what market share they represent properties are still in trouble.

I completely disagree, the information is so limited that there is no way to come up with a conclusion of whether properties are struggling or not. Here is a couple of questions for argument’s sake:
1) If only 1% of overall Google’s Traffic visits particular service, but it represents 90% of market share. Does it mean the service is struggling?
2) If only 1% of overall Google’s Traffic generated 50% of revenue. Does it mean the service is struggling?
3) Linking traffic to revenues makes sense, but what makes more sense is to use conversion rates and bottom lines. Google’s traffic to other than search properties is very targeted and thus even small percentage can represent great profit.

To add to this post, in my opinion the real growth is when the company is able to leverage its existent competencies to generate synergies with new products or services. That means is when you start a new product line or buy a new company it should be 1+1 equals 3. There, is also a process called expansion when 1+1=2 it is not real growth. So I think expecting Google’s properties all to have the same traffic, or to evaluate whether they are struggling or not based on a percentage of traffic is pretty amateurish. Here are my comments on their blog and Ericks responses:

UPDATE: Eric updated the post, and we’ve exchanged a couple of more comments, check it out here

Technorai tags:Statistics, Google