Searchmaven

New Travel Keywords Study

Claria's Feedback Research announced a study conducted on search engine performance for travel-related terms and found that Yahoo! performed better than MSN and Google.

The study found that Yahoo! came in first across the top 10 travel-related search keywords such as "cheap tickets," "travel," "Las Vegas," and "Airline Tickets."

Feedback Research also found among all the keywords, "cheap tickets" generated the highest click rate of 6.55 percent with consumers viewing almost 3.5 pages views per click.  Click here for the full story.

New Survey Shows Most Use More Than One Search Engine

A new survey from Nielsen/NetRatings found that 58% of Google users also utilized MSN Search or Yahoo Search.  The use of multiple search engines is not limited to Google users.  71% of Yahoo Search users visited one of the other top engines and 70% of MSN Search users did likewise.

A total of 4,085,880,000 searches were conducted by US at-home and at-work users in January 2005, and Google accounted for 47% percent of them, maintaining its place as the top search engine. Yahoo! accounted for 21% of searches, and MSN for 13%. The remaining 19% occurred on the sixty other search sites surveyed by Nielsen.

Click here for a summary of the findings.

DoubleClick's Rick Bruner summarizes comScore study

We'd recommend DoubleClick's Smart Marketing Report about Search Marketing even if Rick Bruner,  DoubleClick's Director of Research, wasn't an old friend.  Rick summarizes the results from "Search Before The Purchase", the research study we've previously referenced from comScore Networks that was commissioned by DoubleClick.  Using its panel of 1.4 million U.S. Internet users, comScore observed e-commerce purchases at 30 sites across four product categories: travel, apparel, computer hardware and sports/fitness. It then looked at the 12 weeks of search activity among those buyers preceding their purchases and reached several findings that might surprise search marketers.

New Doubleclick study shows half of all online purchasers search first

A new Doubleclick study, "Search Before the Purchase," analyzed pre-purchase search activity across four categories --apparel, computer hardware, sports and fitness, and travel--and found that nearly half of all online shoppers conducted related research at a search engine before making an online purchase.  Read about it here.

SEO can pay big dividends

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can pay big dividends according to a new study.  Check it out here.