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HOW AMERICANS SEARCH

Chris Sherman, Search Engine Watch

A recent study from Harris Interactive shines interesting light on the behavior and preferences of Americans when searching the web.

The study, commissioned by search marketing firm icrossing, was put together based on interviews with more than 2,100 adults. The findings show that search continues to be a popular online activity, with more than 50% reporting that they searched every time they went online.

What are people searching for? Most people (88%) said they were researching specific topics—specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%).

Other common things people use search for include:

  • Getting directions/maps - 75%
  • Looking for news - 64%
  • Shopping - 51%
  • Looking for entertainment web sites - 47%

The study also affirmed data from the major measurement services, showing Google as the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves. However, the types of information people looked for with each engine varied.

For Ask Jeeves and MSN users, searching for health information is the most popular reason for researching a specific topic. Google users, by contrast, like to look for news and current event information. Google users also tend to use search for business or professional research more than other search engine users.

And we're not as set in our ways as some commentators believe. More than 45% of adults searching for news are looking for differing viewpoints, and 42% are searching for supplemental information.

The study also affirmed anecdotal evidence that people are turning to the internet instead of phone books or yellow pages. 54% indicated they have searched online rather than using a phone book. Most (63%) are looking for the addresses of phone numbers of people, but almost as many (58%) are looking up information on local businesses.

When it comes to shopping, most people (80%) are comparing prices, rather than looking for a local retailer. Similarly, when people are searching for entertainment purposes, the majority (61%) are looking for show times or reviews, rather than download sources.

And the study found that search engine users aren't as loyal as many believe. Just 13% reported that they used Google all of the time. There was even less loyalty among users of the other search engines.

The study suggests Americans are getting savvier about the distinction between paid and organic listings, but still more than half (56%) do not understand the difference between the types of listings. Among those that do know the difference, only about half (51%) prefer organic listings. And in general, men express a stronger preference for organic results than women, who tend not to have a preference.

Results from this study are similar to those found by other studies done by the Pew Internet & American Life project (see Search Engines: A Pew Internet Project Data Memo and Search Engine Users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naive). None of the findings are particularly earthshaking, but are a good read for anyone doing search marketing.

For more information, see the press release covering the study, which also includes instructions on getting a full copy of the report.

SEARCH PLAYS A DOMINANT ROLE IN B2B SALES

Paul J. Bruemmer, ISEDB.com

Savvy business buyers know the fastest and most efficient way to research and compare products and services is on the Web. Even the venerable Thomas Register recently went Web only, discontinuing their print catalog.

Two research studies examined the role of search in B2B marketing, each reporting that search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchase decisions.

B2B Transactions Are Unique

B2B transactions differ from consumer transactions because the sales process requires coordination among multiple personnel before a final decision is made. The time between researching the product and placing the order results in a long sales cycle.

The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa reports the following:

  • 93% of participants said they would research online when making a B2B purchase.
  • 95% said they would use a search engine at some point in the task.
  • 64% chose a search engine over consumer review sites, e-commerce sites, manufacturer's sites and industry portals.
  • While manufacturer's sites and industry portals were a starting place for big budget buyers, 87 percent said they would visit a search engine after visiting those sites.

Search Engines Dominate

The above study is rich with details, and the findings are too lengthy to cover entirely in this article. But here are some important conclusions:

  • Search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchases.
  • Search engines are used in the early or mid research phase in the buying cycle.
  • Google is favored over other search engines.
  • Search engine research takes place at least one to two months before the buying decision.
  • Good balance between organic and paid search is necessary. Organic links get over 70 percent of the clicks.
  • Position is a factor, with over 60 percent clicking on the top three listings.
  • Most users decide which listing to click within seconds of scanning the page.

B2B Buyers Prefer Search to Traditional Media

The Google-Millward Brown study examined technology purchases to identify sources of information used during a three-stage buying cycle defined as “research/engagement,” “consideration/comparison” and “ final purchase.”

The study found that B2B buyers used search engines more often than traditional media throughout the entire buying cycle. Google concluded that search advertising is more effective than trade magazine ads and other traditional B2B media.

  • Research phase: Search used 30 % more often than trade publications.
  • Consideration phase: Search used 21 % more often than B2B publications.
  • Final purchase phase: Search used 62 % more often than traditional media.

Not surprisingly, the study found that benefits and a strong call-to-action are crucial components of a sponsored link. This has implications for your Title and Description Tags in search engine optimization, as these tags are used to create organic links on the search result pages.

Are B2B Sites Optimized for Search Engines?

They all have websites, but according to research, most are not optimized to maximize search engine traffic. Research indicates that 80 to 90 percent of corporate and retail websites are not well optimized. Manufacturing sites also fall short. Yet, the research shows that properly optimized websites enjoy fantastic gains in unique visitors and conversions.

With all the qualified traffic originating from search engines, it is more important than ever for B2B marketers, wholesalers and B2B exchanges to ensure that their websites are correctly optimized for good positioning in search results. There is also good accountability and ROI with search engine optimization.

It's a User-Friendly Tool

Search engine traffic is highly targeted. That's because potential buyers who find your B2B offerings through search engines are looking for your products and services on their own; as a result, they are predisposed to hear your marketing message. You can't find a more qualified prospect than that.

Here's what distinguishes search engine marketing from other types of advertising:

1. It is non-intrusive. Search marketing is a non-intrusive marketing tool. Most advertising, both online and offline, interrupts consumer behavior. If a user goes to a web site for info, up pops an intrusive ad. Reading a newspaper? Ads dominate and force articles to be continued on another page. With search engine marketing, the user is actively seeking your products, services, and information. They are delighted to be driven to your site.
2. It is voluntary. Search marketing is the result of user-originated behavior. Your visitors from search engines and directories have voluntarily clicked on your listing rather than any competitor's; thus, they are motivated to explore your offerings.

JULY KEYWORD PRICES DOWN 4 PERCENT

MarketingVox

The average price of keywords in July declined four percent from June, with decreases in nearly every category, according to Fathom Online, reports MediaPost. The average cost per click was down to $1.65 - the lowest since February's $1.60. The telecom/broadband category keyword prices dropped 13 percent, to $1.72 a click, from $1.97 in June. Finance/investing fell 9 percent, to $1.73 from $1.89. Telecom/wireless fell 4 percent, to $1.14 from $1.19. Declines in the remaining categories were smaller, and consumer services keyword prices were flat.

Search marketing may be undergoing a summer slowdown similar to TV and other advertising, because consumers likely aren't online as much and so marketers are loath to bid high for keywords during what many perceive as a slow season.

Nevertheless, keyword prices in July were, on average, 20 percent higher than in September 2004, when Fathom began publishing its keyword price index. It tracks keyword prices daily from a list of 500 generic keywords across eight categories for the top five ranked positions on selected search engines.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS -- AGAIN

Ben Elgin, Business Week

Google and Yahoo! are hiring away hundreds of top engineers from high tech's most prestigious firms

Some call it the "giant sucking sound" emanating from Silicon Valley. For others, it's a migraine in the making. But whatever they're calling the hiring binge at Google and Yahoo!, just about everyone is a bit astonished at the fearsome force swallowing up some of tech's best and brightest.
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"High-profile researchers are now flocking to the search engines," says Marti Hearst, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley's school of information management and systems.

STOLEN SUPERSTARS. The migration of software-engineering talent to Google and Yahoo is a testament to how high these search companies have risen in the tech firmament. Coveted talent from academia, startups, and venerable tech companies that a decade ago would have flocked to Microsoft Corp. or Sun Microsystems are now more than willing to switch teams and join Google or Yahoo.

In the second quarter alone, Google snapped up about 230 engineers. Recent additions include software superstars Louis Monier, director of eBay advanced technology research, and Kai-Fu Lee, a top-flight researcher at Microsoft -- which prompted the software giant to sue Google and Lee to keep him from going to work there right away.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has recently hired dozens of top engineers, including Larry Tesler, former vice-president for shopping experience at Amazon.com and the company is expected to announce on July 28 that its new head of research is Prabhakar Raghavan, former chief technology officer at search-software outfit Verity and an authority on algorithms.

INTERNET FOCUS. What's behind this talent raid? Another dot-com gold rush it's not. Eager investors already value these businesses at a combined $130 billion, up from about $63 billion last August when Google went public. That means the share prices reflect much of the companies' promise, suggesting stock options could be in for a slower climb from here.

Of course, these top-level search engineers are still among the most well-compensated techno-nerds out there. But there's more than money at work here. These guys -- and they are truly mostly men -- are also attracted to the massive, unsolved technical challenges facing search companies, which affect hundreds of millions of people daily.

In years past, PCs, operating systems, and databases were viewed as core technologies where engineers could work on problems and change people's lives. Today, more techies view search on the Internet as among the most important services.

"The Internet is touching everyone's life," says Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and senior vice-president at Yahoo, who joined the company last December. "A new science is being defined in an area that will take over much of what we do commercially and socially."

LAYING FOUNDATION. Indeed, Google -- and, to a lesser degree, Yahoo -- has become what Microsoft used to be: a young, vibrant company working on the bleeding edge of the day's vexing technical issues. Before the Internet became the phenomenon it is now, Microsoft was a magnet for top talent interested in solving the toughest tech problem: making personal computing easy.

Today, though, the gravitational force at the center of techdom is no longer the PC -- it's the Net. And while MSN holds its own with Google and Yahoo in terms of worldwide use, its engineers can't develop products that would undermine Microsoft's monopoly businesses, Windows and Office. Some researchers say privately that restricts creativity.

If Google and Yahoo are able to maintain their position on the crest of innovation, their current hiring push could lay the foundation for the next generation of corporate labs, following in the footsteps of companies such as Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft. Sure, these members of the tech establishment boast research and development budgets several times larger than those at Google and Yahoo. But the Internet companies are just starting to ramp up their research efforts, while some incumbents, such as HP, are downsizing their labs. "IBM and HP have some very interesting projects," says Yahoo's Raghavan. "But there's an undeniable sense of excitement here that other vendors can't match."

ZANY CULTURE. Once top talent starts to move, it can be a force unto itself. At Google, for instance, staffers marvel at passing in the hallways such luminaries as Rob Pike, one of the creators of the Unix operating system; Adam Bosworth, a pioneer of the XML programming language; or Monier, who helped create AltaVista, one of the Web's most popular search engines in the 1990s. The chance to work alongside tech gurus, who in some cases authored the textbooks that young employees studied in college, can be a powerful draw.

That's half the story. At Google, much of the magnetism is also generated by a zany culture perfectly synced to the geek lifestyle. Engineers are encouraged to spend the equivalent of one day per week on their own pet projects. When they're not staring into their computer monitors, Google employees will often gather for roller-hockey games in the underground garage or race remote-control blimps through their cavernous offices.

Free perks range from gourmet meals at the company cafeteria to bathrooms equipped with digital toilets, where the seat temperature and bidet pressure can be controlled with a remote. "They have created a Willy Wonka effect," says James E. Pitkow, CEO of Moreover Technologies, whose former company, Outride Inc., was purchased by Google in 2001. "Engineers want to work on the coolest problems with the smartest people."

TALENT DRAIN. Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred. Each day the company generates 10 terabytes of data -- equivalent to all the print collections in the Library of Congress. By sorting this unrivaled data pile, engineers quickly can begin to discern how products and features are used as well as how people behave online. Adjustments, then, can be made in a matter of minutes, with improvements quickly felt by the company's 400 million monthly users. "I saw an opportunity to take the user interface to a new level for a huge number of people," says Yahoo's Tesler, who joined in May to spearhead the company's Web design.

While the Internet leaders snatch up top tech talent, that creates headaches elsewhere. Some startups, for instance, say the talent drain has made their own hiring more difficult. Joe Kraus, a co-founder of early portal Excite and now the CEO of collaborative software startup JotSpot, says Google has been especially tough to go up against. "If you're talking to someone great, they're invariably talking to Google, and they often have an offer."

It can be equally difficult for technology mainstays, including Microsoft. Not only has the software giant lost several top minds to Google in recent years, the Redmond (Wash.) company is also facing tougher competition for talent coming out of universities, even in its own backyard. Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle, says Google has hired most of the top one-third of his search class in each of the past two years.

MICROSOFT'S CHALLENGE. Microsoft is hardly standing still. With both boundless cash and massive industry influence, the software giant can pay what it needs to hire the leading lights of industry. But clearly, it's feeling stung -- as evidenced by the suit against Google and Kai-Fu Lee for allegedly breaching a noncompete clause in Lee's contract with Microsoft. Google has filed a countersuit against Microsoft. Neither company would comment on the legal battle.

Clearly, Microsoft's motives reach far beyond Lee. Although it is not the only company feeling the hiring pinch of its search competitors, it desperately needs to hire and retain top talent if it wants to gain ground on Google and Yahoo. The company's recently released search technology has been met with praise.

But with only about 15% of the U.S. search market, Microsoft badly trails its rivals. It needs to come up with innovations to set itself apart from the pack. By going after Google and Lee, it may help deter other talented techies with similar ideas.

Such moves appear to be stopgap measures at best. With torrid growth and booming profits, Google and Yahoo clearly have the cachet to keep their hiring momentum going. Frustrated rivals shouldn't expect that sucking sound to abate anytime soon.