Sales demographics for search engines

Are AOL searches worthless?

[WindSun]

We have a Yahoo store that keeps track of various factors vs who referred them to us.

Google is number 1 in both hits and income, #4 in income per click. Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Alta Vista, and all the usual suspects round out the top 10 list.

The interesting part though is AOL search. They are #6 in order of the number of hits we get. They are number #217 for income, coming in dead last without ONE single sale in six months (out of a total of $737,000 in online sales).

Even some Bulgarian search engine beat them out...

[tedster]

That doesn't sound right to me. Have you checked the site in an AOL browser? It may not be rendering properly.

[victor]

I've tried windsun's site (the non-beta one from the profile) in an old AOL. It renders okay.

One Javascript problem on the Library download and specs:
Line 17 / Line 108 / Unterminated string constant
But ignoring that seems to bring up a working page. Anybody using non-IE.latest browsers has to be used to seeing stray JS error.

There may be other JS errors -- I didn't click around exhasutively. Easiest thing to do is view the site in Opera. Its JS validation and error reporting is excellent (remember to click Preferences / Multimedia / Report JS errors)

[chiyo]

depends on the industry. We are a specialised narrow market b-b and AOL referrals are virtually worthless in terms of delivering qualified leads. Google is much better. I hear AOL is much better for consumer or shopping items in some markets.

[WindSun]

After doing some more digging, I suspect that it is primarily a matter of who - or perhaps what type of personality - uses AOL.

AOL seems to be pretty heavy on the under-18 and "web social life" crowd. I suspect that it is also used by a lot of parents that don't know squat about the internet and thinks it makes for "safe surfing" for their kids.

I suspect the majority from AOL that we get on our sites can't even apply for a credit card.

Google and the other search engines, including some specialized ones, seem to be used by the more net-savvy people, and by people that tend more to use the internet to find things, rather than using the internet itself as entertainement.

Our market is probably 90%+ in the over 30 age groups. If we were selling the latest music CD's AOL would probably rate much higher with us.

It is also quite possible or even probable that the more savvy AOL users are not using AOL search.

"...Easiest thing to do is view the site in Opera..."

I downloaded and installed Opera. It seems to be getting more popular, so probably a good idea to have it for site checks. Our Netscape usage has gotten so low that we pretty much ignore it in design any more.
I got the "BORKED" edition :D

[Mike_Mackin]

>depends on the industry.

AOL users do spend money.
They "obviously" don't necessarily buy the cheapest product or service.

B2B sites we promote don't convert well with the AOL crowd.

[victor]

It is also quite possible or even probable that the more savvy AOL users are not using AOL search.

Quite likely. Most of the AOL users I know would not touch the default browser. Such people would show up in the stats with an AOL IP address but a non-AOL user agent.

Have you correlated AOL IP addresses to sales?

[WindSun]

"Have you correlated AOL IP addresses to sales?.."

No, pretty hard to check that. Yahoo stores does not give access to the raw logs, so all we can see is the referring URL.