How Offline Messages Influence Online Behavior (Page 1 of 4 )
You own a web site, and you optimize it for the search engines. You may also do some offline advertising. This means that you probably wonder if your offline messages are inspiring potential customers to search for you and find your web site. Fortunately, iProspect and JupiterResearch wondered the same thing.
In June of 2007, the two companies teamed up to conduct a survey of US search engine users. They wanted to find out how exposure to offline marketing messages affected searchers; specifically, they wanted to see if offline messages inspired them to perform online searches, and then to make purchases.
The web-based survey comprised about 25 multiple-choice questions that covered respondents’ “behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to games, digital imaging, portable devices, and service bundles,” according to iProspect. More than 2,300 individuals responded to the survey. The sample was large enough that the companies could balance it demographically to ensure it was representative of the online population as a whole. (The error margin, for those who keep track of this kind of thing, is plus or minus three percent).
iProspect used the first few questions to get a handle on how much their respondents used the Internet to search before getting to the meat of the survey. The answer to the first question is one of the most telling. Fifty-seven percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “performing searches on search engines has become more important to my use of the Internet over the last year.” That number increased to 72 percent for those between the ages of 18 and 24, and 71 percent for those with less than one year of experience online (no surprise there). These numbers didn’t skew the results, however; 55 percent of their older and more experienced counterparts agreed with the statement as well.
With searches growing in importance for more than half of the respondents, the answer to the next question should not have been a surprise. iProspect wanted to know how frequently users conducted online searches using a search engine in the past six months. About 54 percent of the sample performed daily searches – and for one-third of the overall sample, this meant multiple daily searches.
Next: It Starts Offline, Goes Online >>
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