- ClickZ, Tuesday, February 28, 2006 10:30 AM
Advertisers who don't measure the offline impact of their search marketing campaigns will be unable to determine the overall effectiveness of the campaigns, says search marketing firm iProspect,
releasing a study conducted by Jupiter Research. In the survey, 62 percent of Internet users who researched products online during the holiday season used a search engine to do so, and nearly half
ended up buying the product they were searching for offline. Merchant sites like Overstock.com were slightly more popular, with 63 percent of consumers using them. Just 26 percent of users visited
shopping-specific search engines like Shopping.com and Froogle. While it's clear consumers definitely use search engines for researching products online, it seems these numbers (although the article
is unclear) were generated by search queries, and don't necessarily say anything about whether consumers saw or clicked on paid search ads or not. Ergo, it's unclear what direct relationship search
spending has on offline conversions. The study, conducted in January, was based on a survey of more than 1700 people selected from Ipsos' U.S. consumer panel.
Read the whole story at ClickZ »