Search Behaviour? Whats that?

04Jun08

Welcome to my world. Working for an online marketing company, I have the pleasure of analyzing “Search”. You must think, wow, what a boring job. To some, yes that may be true, but I find it interesting! Now this is probably the nerd side of me, but hey I love what I do, and thats what matters. So what is search behaviour? Well to put it simply, its the why, how and what the average user is searching for.

I found this great report the other day that helps break down how, we as users, use Search. So I took the liberty of pulling some cool stats, or what I think are cool stats, to share with you. Yes I know there isn’t anything about coffee and massages in this post, but I hope it still intrigues you.

Just a few things to point out. This is a US Survey of 1,649 participants from a company called iProspect. I am only going to focus on “organic” and “paid” search findings. So here we go.

1) Internet users rarely read beyond the 3rd page of search results. 81.7% of respondents will try a new search if they aren’t satisfied with the listings they find within the first 3 pages of results.

2) Homemakers, more than any other profession identified, stop looking at search results after the first page. 52.2% of homemakers who responded said they don’t review more than the first page of search results.

3) Females dig less deep into search results than males. 15.2% more females abandon their review of search results after the first page than males do.

4) Search engine users find natural (organic) search results to be more relevant to their searches. 60.5% of respondents picked a natural search result as they found most relevant to their query.

Ok, so these are only a few of the findings from the survey, but interesting none the less. So what does this tell us. Well for one, it doesn’t surprise me that men will search further into the pages than women. Its funny, it’s almost like instinct. Men would rather explore and scavenge for their result, where Women are happy with the results they find. Kind of like channel surfing or never asking for directions. I could discuss this topic for a lot longer, but you already probably stopped reading after I used the word Search Behaviour. Until my next post.

Adam

Filed under: online marketing   |  1 Comment
Tags: online marketing, organic search, search behaviour