Why 95% of Your Future Customers Aren't Googling You Right Now

Here is a number that should change how you think about your marketing budget: 95%.

That is the proportion of your potential customers who are not in the market for what you sell right now. Not searching. Not comparing. Not filling out enquiry forms. They have no immediate need, and no amount of bidding on Google is going to reach them.

The number comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the world's largest centre for research into marketing effectiveness. His logic is straightforward. If the average business changes a service provider once every five years, then in any given quarter, only about 5% of the market is actively looking. The other 95% are out of market.

Google Ads is built for that 5%. It is arguably the highest-intent advertising channel ever created. Someone types "commercial electrician near me" and your ad appears at the exact moment they need you. Brilliant.

But here is the problem nobody talks about: when that person typed their search, they already had a shortlist in their head. And if your business was not on it, your ad is fighting an uphill battle against names that already feel familiar.

The shortlist is set before the search begins

The 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report studied thousands of purchase decisions and found something that should unsettle any business relying solely on search advertising. In 95% of cases, the winning vendor was already on the buyer's "Day One shortlist" before they contacted anyone. Four out of five deals were won by whichever vendor the buyer reached out to first.

Read that again. The decision was effectively made before the first phone call. Before the first click. Before the search.

This is not a B2B quirk. It is how human decision-making works. When someone searches Google for a plumber, a financial adviser, or an LED screen supplier, they are not conducting a rational evaluation of every option. They are running a retrieval exercise. Which names come to mind? Which ones feel safe? The click goes to the familiar name. The "research" that follows is mostly confirmation of a choice already made.

Professor Dawes describes this as mental availability: the probability that your brand comes to mind in a buying situation. It is not the same as general awareness. It is whether your name surfaces in the specific moment someone thinks, "I need a new [thing you sell]."

Google Ads does not build mental availability. It captures demand that mental availability has already created.

The budget split most businesses get backwards

Les Binet and Peter Field spent decades analysing the IPA Databank, a collection of nearly 1,000 advertising effectiveness case studies. Their conclusion, published in The Long and the Short of It, is one of the most important findings in modern marketing.

Advertising does two distinct jobs. Activation drives immediate action from people already in market. Think Google Ads, special offers, direct response. Brand building creates memory structures in the minds of people who are not in market yet, so that when they eventually enter the category, your name is already familiar.

Binet and Field found that the campaigns producing the strongest long-term profit growth allocated roughly 60% of budget to brand building and 40% to activation. For B2B specifically, the split adjusts to around 46% brand, 54% activation, reflecting longer sales cycles.

What is the actual market doing? According to WARC data, the average business now allocates 68.8% to performance and just 31.2% to brand. The split has inverted. And long-term marketing effectiveness has declined alongside it.

Most Australian SMEs have it even more lopsided. Many are running 100% activation and 0% brand. Every dollar goes into Google Ads. Nothing goes toward reaching the 95% who are not searching yet.

This is not a criticism of those businesses. Google Ads is measurable, accountable, and delivers results this month. Brand building is slow, harder to attribute, and does not show up in a weekly report. The incentives push you toward activation. But the research is unambiguous: businesses that only harvest demand without creating it eventually hit a ceiling.

The zero-click problem makes this worse

Here is what has changed since Dawes first published his research: Google itself is becoming less effective at the one job it does brilliantly.

Rand Fishkin and SparkToro have been tracking what they call zero-click searches since 2019. Their latest data, using Datos clickstream analysis, shows that nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to any website. AI Overviews, featured snippets, and Google's own properties are answering queries directly in the search results.

For SMEs, this compounds the 95-5 problem. Not only are 95% of your potential customers not searching, but even among the 5% who do search, a growing proportion never click through to anyone. The window of opportunity that Google Ads operates in is narrowing.

This does not mean Google Ads is dying. It remains the most efficient way to capture high-intent demand. But it means the strategic case for reaching people before they search has never been stronger. If the search itself is becoming less clickable, the brands that win will be the ones buyers already trust before they type a single word.

Fishkin's proposed solution aligns with Dawes and Binet & Field: build brand where people actually spend time. Create value on platforms. Show up in feeds, in inboxes, in local communities. Stop treating every marketing dollar as something that must produce a trackable click, and start treating some of it as an investment in being remembered.

What "reaching the 95%" actually looks like for a small business

The science is clear. But the practical question remains: what does a small business with a limited budget actually do about this?

The answer is not "spend less on Google Ads." If Google Ads is working, keep it. The answer is to carve out even a small portion of effort, not necessarily budget, toward activities that build familiarity with people who are not searching yet.

The ceiling nobody warns you about

Here is how this plays out in Google Ads accounts over time.

A business launches Google Ads with no existing brand presence. Early results are reasonable because there is always some demand to capture. But click-through rates on generic searches are modest, because nobody recognises the name. Cost per lead is acceptable but not great. The business optimises bids, tests ad copy, improves landing pages. Results improve incrementally.

Then they plateau. Non-branded search CTRs have dropped 26% year-on-year as AI features push ads further down the page. CPCs keep rising. The business is capturing the same pool of searchers, but that pool is not growing because nobody is doing the work to expand it.

Compare this with a competitor who splits effort between Google Ads and consistent local brand building. Their branded search volume grows over time. People search for them by name, which costs almost nothing per click. Their generic ad CTR is higher because buyers recognise the name in the ad and click more readily, which improves Quality Score, which lowers their CPC for the same position. Their cost per lead drops while the first business's cost per lead rises.

Both businesses are running Google Ads. The difference is that one invested in the 95% and the other did not. The compounding advantage is not theoretical. It shows up in the data every month.

The uncomfortable truth

If your budget only allows one channel, Google Ads is still the right choice. It captures high-intent buyers at the moment of decision. Nothing else does that as well.

But treating Google Ads as your entire marketing strategy is like fishing with a net in a pond and wondering why the pond never gets bigger. The fish were always going to swim somewhere. The question is whether they swim toward you or toward the competitor whose name they have been seeing for the past twelve months.

The 95% are out there right now. They are not searching for you. They are scrolling past your competitor's posts, driving past your competitor's signage, reading your competitor's content. Every encounter is a tiny deposit into a mental bank account that will pay interest the day they finally do need what you sell.

Start there.

Further Reading

• John Dawes - The 95:5 Rule - Original explanation from the Ehrenberg-Bass researcher
• 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report - Data on how buyers build shortlists before contacting vendors
• Les Binet & Peter Field - IPA Effectiveness Research - The Long and the Short of It framework
• Rand Fishkin on Brand Influence in a Zero-Click World - Why brand building matters more as clicks decline
• Marketing Week - The 95:5 Rule is the New 60:40 Rule - How the two frameworks connect