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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Searching for Baby Food
Do people care enough about consumer packaged goods (CPG) to go online and search for their websites? A recently released study of online search habits says, without a doubt, they do.
The study is a joint project of ComScore, SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) Proctor and Gamble and Yahoo, and it’s creating quite a buzz online these days.
Entitled "The Digital Shelf: the Opportunity for Search Marketing in Consumer Packaged Goods," the extensive study found out that the majority of American consumers visited at least one package-goods website during the first three months of 2007. Search was the driver of a good percentage of their visits.
Look at these numbers: Food products led the pack with nearly 44 million category site visitors from search. Baby products generated 15.7 million visitors; personal care products followed with 9.8 million and household products attracted 1.7 million visitors. Search created a significant percentage of those visits: 60% of visitors to baby product sites; 47% of visitors to food sites; 27% of visitors to personal care sites, and 23% of visitors to household products sites.
They’re not just clipping coupons
More fascinating statistics: The study also revealed that the majority of non-searchers and searchers weren’t just clipping electronic coupons (that activity accounted for 47% of non-searchers and 40% of searchers). The bigger numbers came from people seeking information and help about consumer products - 73% of searchers and 58% of non-searchers.
This is a pivotal report for all of us in the Search Engine Marketing profession. It proves that search is playing an ever-increasing role in how consumers make important buying decisions, whether it’s shopping for a mortgage or finding out how safe their baby foods are.
Not only is search bringing more traffic to CPG sites, that traffic is first-class. Searchers are predominately female, with higher incomes, better educated, and bigger spenders than non-search traffic.
The potential for search is tremendous for CPG companies who are now spending a mere sliver of their advertising budgets on search. It looks like search can reach the mass audiences these major conglomerates have been having such a hard time reaching in traditional, offline media.
"The Digital Shelf" study is huge for SEM professionals like me who have always known that search would become a ever-increasing part of people’s lives. Search helps make sense of our information-overloaded society and all of the choices we face. It helps us make better, faster decisions whether we are house hunting or shoe shopping.
Subject for our next article: "Bridging the CPG Search Gap." Consumers are searching online for CPG products, but even their favorite products are hard to find.
posted by joseph mcelroy @ 10:48 AM
 
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