Ecommerce for Small Business

Online Marketing Trends - Patterns in Search Engine Usage

In spite of the economic slowdown being experienced by industries worldwide, online marketing has continued to grow. IN fact the overall spend on online marketing has risen in the same period where business spending in most activities has fallen.

Online marketing has evolved significantly with time. Today online marketing has gone far beyond advertising only on major search engines like Google and Yahoo. The recent popularity of Web2 including social networking websites, blogs and forums provide new mediums to market your website which were previously unimaginable. The search engine market is growing exponentially year on year. It is fast becoming the most preferred and cost effective marketing medium for businesses across the world. As the search market continues to grow, Google’s domination of overall market share of search traffic has remained stable. Nevertheless other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN should not be overlooked as they still command a double figure presence in the US market.

• More than two thirds of all Internet users use search engines to find the information.
• Google has approximately 70% share of the world search engine market.
• Google’s share of search engine market is even higher in UK and Europe where it commands nearly 80% of the total search engine market.
• Search engine reach in the UK is the highest where 85% of users use search engines.
• Search engines in the UK also receive the most hits; more than in any other country.
  User Behaviour

Along with the growth of the internet, the consumer behaviour patterns have also changed in recent years. More users now rely on the internet to for their information. The way we search is also changing. The number of multiple keyword queries has increased and so has the frequency of searches. Following are some important statistics that highlight these trends.

• An internet user on an average spends almost 5% of their internet time on search engines. An average every internet user spent 27 minutes on search engines each month and views nearly a 100 search pages, accounting for 3.4% of total time spent online.
• The heaviest search users come from France and Spain
• Many users use a search engine as their point of entry to the Internet