ONLINE MARKETING Online Marketing Research YOU ARE HERE!

ONLINE MARKETING & SEARCH ENGINE PROMOTION RESEARCH

Valuable Insight Into Internet Website Marketing Statistics

Internet is not only a huge potential customer base but online information influence greatly both offline purchasing and shaping of branding perception. Therefore, online marketing needs to be incorporated in overall marketing campaign to achieve maximal results. In addition, implementing e-marketing strategies is considerably less expensive and not limited in reach compared to offline marketing, and yet each and every objective of an offline marketing campaign can be accomplished with a successful online website marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plays a substantial role in online website marketing. ONE IN THREE AMERICANS USE A SEARCH ENGINE. Search engines are the primary tool people use to navigate the Web, so the most important objective of Internet marketing is to get your website recognized by the search engines. Users tend to look through just a first few pages of search engine result pages (SERPs), so effective search engine marketing strategies need to be implemented to get ahead of the competition.

As expert website marketing involve continual research, learning, and utilizing that knowledge, timely insight into online marketing research and statistics is valuable element of your overall marketing campaign.

INTERNET IS A HUGE POTENTIAL CUSTOMER BASE

Latest statistics, from Internet WorldStats published survey, reveal there are 719 million worldwide Internet users. The number of worldwide Internet users will top 1 billion in 2005, according to eTForecasts.

The US is still the largest Internet market, with over 186 million Internet users, according to the independent research from Nielsen-Netratings and Internet WorldStats (December, 2003). Ipsos-Insight's annual study of Internet trends confirms that the US continues to have the largest global Internet population, representing 40% of the total Internet population (January, 2004).

The new Ipsos-Insight's survey found that the US has the highest incidence of Internet usage, as 68% of the population goes online once a month. Their previous researches confirmed that people are becoming increasingly dependent on the Internet.

ONLINE PRESENCE IMPACTS BRANDING & OFFLINE PURCHASING

Business Software Association survey indicates that 93% of American Internet users have bought online. Online spending increased 35% ($18.5 billion) over 2002 during the 2003 holiday season, according to the eSpending Report from Goldman, Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive®, and Nielsen/NetRatings.

The above results refer just to the products sold directly online. But 2003 American Interactive Consumer Survey by the Dieringer Research Group, showed that, in addition to online spending, the Internet influenced offline purchases 50% greater than direct online spending.

The same survey also revealed that 1 out of 4 US consumers says that online information changed their branding perceptions during the past year.

The Dieringer Group has been conducting this survey since 1995, and underlined previously that online information have significant impact on shopping brands. Therefore they suggested marketers to provide online websites promotion and branding consistent with the overall branding which their companies wish to convey. The latest data show remarkable impact of online information both on brand opinions and online-influenced offline purchasing.

ONE IN THREE AMERICANS USE A SEARCH ENGINE

"Search engines continue to be the primary tool people use to navigate the Web" (Jason Levin, Nielsen/NetRatings). According to a study from iProspect, 3/4 of Internet users utilize search engines. Nielsen/NetRatings finding in January 2004 confirms it: 114.5 million people in the US used an online search engine during the month, which represents 76% of the active online US population. Each of them is spending about forty minutes during the month. 39% of the US population utilize search engines.

The same Nielsen/NetRatings study indicates that top five search destinations were Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, AOL Search and Ask Jeeves during January 2004. Google received the majority of the unique audience in US, with 39.37%, and Yahoo!'s search followed with 30.38% of unique active home and work Internet users in January 2004. MSN received 29.63%, AOL 15.53% and AskJeeves 8.49%.

The data released by OneStat.com, show that the difference is greater in global usage share, where Google is the leading search engine with 55.1 percent, the second most popular is Yahoo! with 20.6 percent, than MSN Search with 9.4 and AOL Search with global usage share of 3.5 percent.

According to the research from WebSideStory, the top four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL, also account for more than 90 percent of all global search referrals to shopping websites,with Google as the leading one.

"Search engines are quickly becoming the first destination for online shoppers, and we expect that trend to continue through 2004" (Jason Levin, Nielsen/NetRatings). Nielsen//NetRatings January 2004 study showed that holiday online shoppers utilized search engines to find and compare online stores. Google is the leading search engine with 36% of consumer audience, followed by Yahoo! Search with 25%, MSN Search 14%, and Ask Jeeves and AOL Shopping 5% each.

According to WebSideStory's recent independent study, based on 29 million search engine visits to dozens of e-commerce sites, AOL's search service has the best referral-to-order conversion ratio among major search engines in 2003. The search engine visits include those generated by both paid search keywords and organic listings. In short, AOL members are most likely to buy.

CyberAtlas reports that 56 percent of Internet users don't bother looking through more than two pages of results on search engines, while iProspect's Search Engine Branding Survey found that the numbers drop significantly for every page thereafter: next three pages (10.3 percent) and more than three pages (8.7 percent).

User Oriented Design & Ethical Website Marketing Strategies by Distinctia, 2003