not as many as before. in fact, the number of google searches has dropped by 50% since 2004.
we were alerted to this “alarming online search trend” by amit vemuri, ceo at teaspiller, a company which has already generated a little controversy in these pages. but read on for vemuri’s views and analysis. vemuri’s take is interesting, provocative, and, if correct, problematic for the profession. his call to action isn’t necessarily new, but that doesn’t make it any less urgent. then see the rebuttal here.
— rick telberg
by amit vemuri
ceo, teaspiller
it’s a wake-up call to the worldwide accounting community. it also confirms the aicpa’s latest survey about how all size firms are having a hard time getting new clients (and retaining clients).
observations:
- online searches for “accountants” have declined by 50% since 2004.
- the steady decline represents a cagr of about -10%.
- the problem is happening worldwide – not just in the united states.
some good explanations:
- do-it-yourself accounting software is stealing market share from accountant practices.
- accountants don’t know how (or want) to market themselves online.
some other explanations – mostly refuted:
we’ve spoken to the accounting community and got a lot of possible explanations. here are some of the explanations we’ve refuted.
- “clients search for specialties.” we’ve tried multiple types of accountant searches (cpas, pcaob, financial planners, etc.) and almost all are seeing declines.
- “clients look for accountants in a particular location.” since this was a broad search, the location would be included in the trend (e.g. a search for “accountants in omaha” would appear in the trends since the word “accountants” is in the search).
- “all professional services are seeing a decline.” actually, the trends search for “doctors” didn’t see the same decline – while lawyers did see a similar decline (lawyers are facing pressure from diy alternatives as well).
- “there’s a problem in the way google scales the search volume in the graph.” while there are more pictures of cute kittens on the internet, the search volume was indexed in relation to 2004 – and there are more people using the internet now than ever before. read more here about how google scaled the data.
some possible (and controversial) solutions:
here are some ideas we heard from the accounting community to help fix the problem.
- accountants need to make it more convenient for clients to work online with their accountants. one of the main draws of diy alternatives is convenience. accountants need tools to make their service equally as convenient online (e.g. online credit card processing, virtual office tools, or anything that reduces a trip to an accounting office).
- organizations, like the aicpa and the institute of chartered accountants, need to spend more on marketing their members to the general public. for example, in 2010, the aicpa (aicpa annual report, pdf) made over $200 million from its members, but spent only $8 million on marketing members (note: aicpa executives pocketed $21 million in salaries). to contrast, turbotax and h&r block combined spend about half a billion dollars on marketing a year – and have whittled away at the image of accountants as “quality” practitioners.
- create a real directory for all accountants to be listed and marketed effectively. make it so easy for clients to search for an accountant online that customers have a single destination to find and compare accountants. currently, potential clients who try to search for an accountant online have a herculean task–clients are using google, yelp, linkedin, state board websites, and other sources to try to triangulate and find a great accountant. the aicpa and other accounting organizations could band together to create a common marketing platform for all their members–and use revenue from members to market the directory to the general public.
we can see that there’s a basic public awareness problem on the value of using an accountant. but we also hear about the complaints about “quality” and “convenience” with using accountants too. the google search trend is an alarm about our complacency as an industry–and should be a call to action.
12 responses to “who’s searching for “accountants?””
dhananjay agarwal
two points:
1. google trend data is interesting when comparing multiple terms. for example, accountants and cpa. when comparing multiple terms, the denominator effect is normalized, and one can determine which are more popular words for a given category.
2. for single word, google trend data will be interesting for a period where there is some stability in total number of internet searches. using a broad range 2004-2012 is not the ideal, as denominator has grown exponentially during that period. it is like taking water from a glass that is 50% full and putting it in a bucket and saying it is 1% full. now making conclusions based on a change from 50% to 1% is incorrect.
however, using the last 30 days or last 12 months is ok. during this period one could assume that the total searches is a constant. in such cases, google trends displays interesting seasonality results on the search word. for example, one will notice higher searches in january-march than during the summer months for the word “accountants”.
thanks,
dhananjay
dhananjay agarwal
to point 2, i would like to add, that in addition to seasonality, one will also see the impact of external events such as madoff and others during the time period. these are all combined in the graph and the news trends graphs can help separate them out directionally.
brian swanson
the interpretation of data here is very interesting to say the least. it appears that several people have varying opinions about whether the search for accountant or accountants has increased. my $.02 is that rarely does a prospect search such a broad term to find an accountant. if you live in fort lauderdale you would most likely use some qualifying word to ensure you get local results rather than someone three states away.
now one could properly argue that google would immediately detect your location and serve results only in your area. 1. i have seen instances where google does not do this. however, let’s assume it will do this properly. 2. the mindset of the person entering the search term is “generally” to tell the search engine that they want “city name” accountant or “city name” cpa.
as a result, i don’t think it really matters whether the long term trend for the keyword accountant is up or down. it actually really does not matter since most people don’t search for a term like this.
equally as important, a broad keyword term indicates that the prospect is not far along in the sales cycle. practically, one can see there is a difference in the intention of a person searching 2010 cars and the person searching 2010 ford mustang cobra xl blue. clearly the latter search is someone who is much closer to making an actual purchase from the perspective that they know what they want.
anon
this article is misleading and based entirely on an incorrect interpretation of partial data.
div bhansali
the number of google searches for accountants hasn’t dropped by over 50% since 2004. in fact, it’s grown pretty substantially.
google trends doesn’t chart absolute growth or decline in a search term – it charts how popular that term is relative to searches as a whole. this is from google’s own help document (http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#1):
“google trends analyzes a portion of google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on google over time.”
so let’s take 2009 as an example. your google trends chart shows about a 9% drop for the term “accountant” between jan 2009 and jan 2010. however, the total amount of search traffic on google grew by 16.7% during that period. (that’s from comscore data.)
so, during 2009, overall google searches on “accountant” didn’t go down; they actually went up by over 6% that year alone.
and 2009 certainly isn’t an anomaly. in fact, overall search volumes were increasing by anywhere from 20-50% annually between 2004 and 2008. that means you would’ve seen annual double-digit growth in “accountant” searches during most of that period.
yes, accountants can and should do a better job of communicating and marketing the value of their services to potential clients. but to declare that the level of client interest in finding accountants has dropped is simply false. (and frankly a bit dangerous, because it could lead accountants to move away from marketing channels that are still tremendously useful.)
norm
interesting points dhananjay, div and springfieldrick.
what is your take on the work “accountant” as a search phrase (or accountants). the search results returned on such a search or horrible. when searching for a service, such as an accountant, most searches put their location in the search phrase, such as “cincinnati accountant”. is google showing data strictly on the work accountant, or are they calculating broad matches as well.
amit vemuri
[posting this again because the discussion is now in two posts]
hi div and dhanajay!
nice – these are good debate points to my article! but i covered most of these?
sorry if this gets a bit technical for some readers:
1. i actually linked to google’s explanation about fixed vs. relative scaling in my post. you can download the fixed data as well. i think that’s what rick used to create the graph image.
2. if the data is “relative”, you can’t argue that searches for “accountants” have increased. google hasn’t told us what the denominator is in their trend equation. if you’re using the “relative data” argument, you could argue the relative data might suggest “accountants” searches have either stagnated or declined. but not increased.
3. google’s comscore data can’t be used. you can’t overlay comscore data on top of google trends data and argue “relative” searches haven’t decreased – we don’t know how google is counting searches in the trend data. for example, google’s definition of a search for trends is probably a lot different than a comscore search for google properties. google could be filtering searches a lot differently than comscore to make the trend data useful.
again, good stuff! look forward to more comments. but also sent an email if you’d like to do a call to discuss.
amit
div bhansali
hi amit,
i posted this on my rebuttal page, but i’ll post it here as well.
1. the only difference between “relative” and “fixed” data on google trends is the time frame that’s used to calculate the average. if you select “relative”, then the results are scaled to the average traffic during the entire period (which for our purposes is 2004-present). if you choose “fixed”, the data is scaled to the average traffic during a fixed point in time (jan 2004 in our example). either way, the chart will show the same trend, and help us reach the same conclusion: that searches for “accountants” are a smaller percentage of the overall universe of searches than they used to be.
2. as i mentioned above, selecting “relative” in no way diminishes the conclusion that overall searches for “accountants” have gone up. the ratio of “accountants” searches to all searches has gone down by around 50% over seven years, but the number of total searches has gone up by a far greater amount – well above 200% during that same time period. that adds up to a significant increase in searches for accountants.
3. i selected comscore data to show overall growth in search for 2 simple reasons: it has an excellent reputation and it’s widely available. they directly monitor the search patterns of over 2 million users to get a statistically significant analysis on how much overall search volumes are growing. yes, google’s actual numbers may vary from comscore’s because they’re counting everyone who searches on their site, not just a large sample, but the trend would be the same, and wouldn’t in any way change the overall takeaway here.
(in case you still question the validity of comscore for this exercise, one additional point of supporting data: i worked for a leading online marketing network from 2007 – 2010, and we used our own methodology to track the growth of google searches. in every month we tracked during my tenure, the year-over-year growth was at least 10% – and that was down from earlier years where growth was 20% or higher.)
no matter how you slice it, i believe the data tells us the same thing: searches for “accountants” have significantly grown, not shrunk, over the past 7 years.
dhananjay agarwal
hi norm,
broad search. however, more people are typing the term “accountant” than “accountants” in search queries.
thanks,
dhananjay
springfieldrick
this call to action should be taken with a grain of salt. he clearly was looking for some abnormality to support his business thesis. if you look at the word “accountant” as opposed to “accountants” in , you’ll notice that not much has changed at all in the past 7 years. furthermore, if you look at the number of per month of the search term “accountant” vs. “accountants”, accountant has 5m per month searches vs. 3.5m per month for accountants. finally, we’ve gotten more sophisticated using the internet over time so a phrase entered into google such as accountants could turn into find a new york accountant seven years later. therefore, i don’t think this is a meaningful “trend” at all.
amit vemuri
hi springfieldrick!
good stuff. so covered these points as well:
1. search volume vs. trend data. you can’t introduce google search volume data (i’m assuming you’re using google’s traffic estimate tool). that data is notorious for not being a true estimate of search volume for keywords. i was tempted to do it myself!
2. accountant vs. accountants. there’s a lot of noise in the word “accountant” — if you look at searches in google (or suggested keywords), you’ll see that job sites, salary, and labor stats are coming up. this would suggest that the keyword is used more by the accountant community than clients. you could argue that their is the same noise in “accountants” too — but it seems to be at much lesser extent.
2. broad search vs. specific search vs. phrase search. the trend data is for broad search — so encompasses specific and phrase searches.
dhananjay agarwal
the graph showing a decline in the trend for the word “accountant” is relative to all google searches. google searches have grown exponentially over time but the search for the word “accountant” hasn’t. interpreting this trend as the search for accountant going down is incorrect.
see the note below on how google trends work, pulled directly from their website at http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#1
we need to understand the purpose of the visualized data before drawing erroneous conclusions. google trends shows users’ propensity to search for a certain topic on google on a relative basis.
as the total number of searches on google has increased exponentially, the graph showing a decline doesn’t mean that the search for accountant has decreased. it means that today the searches for the word “accountant” comprise a small portion of the total search volume within the us, compared to that of 2004. that is true as the total number of google searches are a lot more today than in 2004.
thanks,
dhananjay