Search Engine Strategies: Searcher Behavior: Performics
The last speaker was from Performics, now under the DoubleClick family (I didn’t catch his name). They took a look at product searches over a twelve week period. What they discovered was that many searchers take weeks to buy a product, and that sites that have short cookie times lose out on lots of valuable customer data. In the travel industry, some 50% of purchasers made their last search two weeks before purchasing, meaning most sites have no idea how 50% of their customers actually found them.
Half of all buyers search before purchasing, so this sort of data is everything in e-commerce. The majority of buyers use generic terms at first, but settle on brand names as they close in on a purchase. The long-term searches (those taking several weeks) saw generic searches almost the whole time, followed by a large surge of brand name searches close to purchase. This is valuable information for sites looking to lure those customers, needing to rank properly for customers about to buy.
Apparell and travel customers normally search for weeks. Interestingly, most buyers completely ignore merchant brands in favor of true generics, which actually ranked better, so merchant brands deliver a terrible return on investment.
The lesson: Your buyers are taking their time. The more information you give them, the better. Besides ranking well on generics, make sure your product info pages have gobs of useful information (which will help your ranking anyway). Simply showing a picture and a price is a sure-fire way to lose a customer.
