Dylan Hunter

From eMarketer, (they’ll lock it up soon, but out of fairness, here’s the link until they do):

Search Engines Help Small Businesses

MAY 22, 2007

Small businesses depend more on search engine traffic than larger firms, according to a study conducted by Hitwise in early 2007.

The firm measured the percentage of average monthly traffic companies in the Internet Retailer “Top 500 Guide” received from search engines in 2005 and 2006. Half of the businesses ranked from the 400th to the 500th positions depended on search engines for 50% or more of their total site traffic.

By comparison, none of the top 100 retailers generated more than 40% of their site traffic from search engines, and half had between 20.1% and 30% of their traffic come from search engines.

Web-only merchants averaged 64% their of monthly site traffic from search engines.

Chain retailers and consumer brand manufacturers averaged 28% and 27% of their site traffic from search engines, respectively.

• …for every $1 dollar spent online the average search-user spends $2.56 offline.
• …those who search up to 10 times annually spend an average of $1,789 online while those who searched 31+ times spent an average of $2,943 online. Similarly in off-line transactions, those who search 10 or fewer times spend an average of $2,219 through retail locations, while those who search 31+ times spend an average of $3,839.
• …Search influences 20-30% of purchases made at retail locations
• …among general populace, 49% of money spent online & 42% spent at retail locations are the result of Search

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Was an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminding us in the course of designing social suggestion-based sites / software to not forget one of the most critical reasons for in the first place - serendipity / new discovery. Sometimes this is best accomplished by “more like this,”‘es and/or “people who viewed this purchased..” kinds of things, (i.e. narrowing / refinement goal-oriented) and sometimes best accomplished by purposely broadening / adjusting the scope to introduce some new variance and seeing where things progress from there.

Many years ago there was a little search startup called Direct Hit here in MA, (who earned $500M on a cheaper version of what I wanted to do, but that’s another story) who really was the first entity to hang their hat on social suggestion-based search results, knowing full well that most folks only look at results 1-3, and almost no one beyond 10, so that those results that it initially presented as 1-3 would almost always tend to stay there, whether they were the best results or not - i.e. for anyone who’s ever used Excel, an infinite circular error.

As we all took this kind of click-through analysis / adjustment functions in to become one of the ranking criteria we used, (and / or at least used to internally evaluate how good a job we were doing in delivering relevant results - with all of the appropriate mechanisms for negating bounce - i.e. clicking through on a link, saying “this isn’t what I wanted” and hopping back to the search page, etc) the import of regularly introducing different results into the mix to make sure we were actually doing a much better job of delighting folks became more and more clear then, and still holds true today.

But enough of me babbling, Nat does a superb job of describing, so go read it from him!

Again, have to be careful as to the motives of the sponsor, but….

December 1, 2005 — TRUSTe, the independent online trust authority, and TNS announced the results of their 2005 Holiday Shopping/Online Trust Survey. It revealed that while 78 percent of American Internet users plan to conduct some shopping online this year, 69 percent of those shoppers will limit their online purchasing because of fears associated with misuse of personal information. The 1,005 consumers surveyed also indicated that concerns about privacy issues will deter more than 40 percent of consumers from shopping at smaller online retailers.

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