September 02 2008

Consumer electronics buyers search more for gadgets

New research into the search stages consumers go through when looking to purchase electronics goods has come up with some surprising results — and a way for some more of that search marketing spend to be spread across the business and not just allocated to online...

Consumers put more effort into finding portable electronic products such as MP3 players and mobile phones than brown or white goods and, when they decide to buy, it's almost fifty fifty whether they make the purchase offline or online, according to new research.

Search engine marketer The Search Works has conducted research with data from Yahoo! and Comscore into search trends and buying patterns of people looking for consumer electronics items.

For the survey, searches were categorised into three groups; brown goods, portables and white goods. Users looking for portable goods were found to conduct an average of four searches before making a purchase while in brown goods and white goods only two searches were conducted before buying.

Other findings:

• The first search is just the start of the journey — just 2-6% of searchers purchase during the initial search
• Some consumers are playing a long game — 14% of searches do not convert until the third month
• They're not looking for a media player, they're looking for an iPod — 89% of searches for portable goods were for specific brands or products, with only 11% representing generic terms
• ...but they don't know what they want when it comes to the less sexy larger items — generic search terms were used in 53% of brown goods searches and 51% of white goods searches
• Consumers look for white goods at the weekend and smaller items in the early part of the week — Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are when the majority of brown goods and portables searches occur while Sunday is the day when white goods searches peak.
• Search engine marketing costs can be split with your bricks and mortar operation — search is almost as likely to result in an offline purchase (46%) as an online transaction (54%)
• "Mobile phone" was the most popular generic search term, closely followed by "TV", "MP3", "digital camera" and "fridge freezer".

The research was produced by monitoring 150,000 key words used by comScore's panel of 100,000 consumers and surveying 754 people.

by Sarah Clark (Web Editor)