Why do we search for “marketing” 135,000 times per day in the UK? And where have all the click throughs gone?

According to Google, we Brits enter the term marketing into our favourite search engine 134,466 times every day.  That translates to around 4.1 million times per month (curiously, by contrast, the term selling is searched for only 32,877 times per day – or just over 1 million times per month).

The accepted wisdom is that the number one organically ranked page on Google can expect to gain – on average – a potential 42pc of the total number of searches performed for a term. In the case of marketing in the UK, this should translate to a whopping 56,475 visits per day to the lucky page. And according to Google, the beneficiary should be the home page of Centaur Publishing’s Marketing Magazine – to the tune of around 1.75 million page views per month.

However, according to Google Ad Planner, the total number of page views to the Marketing Magazine site as a whole is currently only around 260,000 per month.

Clearly, there is a discrepancy somewhere.

Let us assume that Google’s search volume figures are correct. What are the possible explanations?

1. For some bizarre reason, the vast majority of people who click on the term marketing don’t actually then click on any of the results they receive.
   
2. The principal that the vast majority of click throughs from search occur on the first SERP (indeed, 42pc from the top ranked result) doesn’t hold in reality. Could it be that for certain terms, people stray far and beyond the first SERP?

Or it could be that Google Ad Planner’s figures tremendously underestimate the actual page views that Marketing Magazine is receiving?

Once again, in spite of all the data made available for free – and the ever growing list of general “rules” of internet marketing – the simple expedient of testing out data and theory together seems to throw up a host of contradictions.

Or perhaps I have missed a blindingly obvious explanation for all of the above – I’m more than willing to have my ignorance in this matter corrected. As, I’m sure, will most client side marketers who need to demonstrate the validity of their decisions.