Search Engines' Influence on Shopping

Interesting article

[Tor]

DoubleClick reports that in December 2002, 41% of US consumers reached a site they used to research a purchase by using a search engine.

BizReport [bizreport.com]

[vitaplease]

WebSideStory reported last month that the number of people arriving at desired Web sites by using search engines or Web links has dropped from 51.9% in February 2001 to 35.6% in February 2003.

IMO, in absolute numbers per surfer, there still is a great increase of "using search engines". Its the community members, daily reaching their favourite lurking holes through their bookmarks, that dominate "the how did I reach a website" percentages.

[Jon_King]

I find the "guessed the url" number to be huge. I would like to know what percent is a 'company name' and what percent a 'product description' url.

For instance, how many people are typing apples.com when they look for apples?

[hobbnet]

Yea, those "guessed URL" numbers seem high to me. I wouldn't be suprised if they included people who "guessed" the URL for Amazon.

[cfx211]

Once you become a regular user of a site, you type it in or bookmark it which I guess makes you a part of the "guessed it group"

I can tell you from personal experience that our site is a branded name, but we also own the generic name url for the topic our site is about and the split between brand and generic has to be 96%+ brand and the rest generic.

The other thing that influences this breakdown for us and something that the article does not mention is traffic from partners and links. A good portion of our traffic comes through the relationships we have in place with our partners. Traffic from partnerships and good old fashioned linking is neglected in this study.

Finally not to be too cyncical, but take a look at who is behind this study. Doubleclick has a very different market and idea of the internet than most people. The internet is too broad and there are too many different sites and markets to put all that much stock in these general 3 paragraph studies.

I got a degree in the sciences and if I wrote up a 3 paragraph article saying that mammals first like to use fresh water as a means of hydration, and then also use these 3 other supplies, people would tell me a. that seems fairly obvious and b. I don't care about all mammals, I care about bats and they use fruit nectar as a means of hydration.