• by Masha Geller , March 7, 2003

Don’t know about you, but my Friday would not be complete without some Nielsen//NetRatings weekly traffic stats. This week, however, probably due to the DoubleClick and the AAAA conferences, the researchers didn’t get to counting visitors and instead released a much more interesting report, which examined the "touchpoints" that connect consumers with brands.

The survey examined nine categories of products: prescription drugs, auto, travel, health and beauty, electronics, mortgage and insurance, movies, telecom and food, and examined the sequence of how consumers first learn about these products, how they further learn about them and which factor most influenced their purchase decision.

The notable finding, as Doug Knopper, VP/GM of Online Advertising at DoubleClick, put it, is that “While TV remains the great builder of awareness, interactive marketing is shown to have a profound impact on the further learn and purchase decision phases of the purchase process."

According to the report, websites, both company websites and content sites, and online marketing, advertising and email are shown to have a major impact on the purchase process in certain categories. In the travel category, travel websites are the number one driver of awareness (cited by 41% of respondents), followed by online marketing (11%) and online search (9%). Although it is not a primary builder of awareness in other categories, at both the further learning and the crucial purchase decision stages, the interactive channel is a top three influence in almost all categories. Compared to other media, online advertising is highly effective at getting consumers to those crucial company websites.

Another interesting tidbit is food-related. The researchers asked the primary food shoppers of households about food-related interactive media and whether it impacts their purchase process, and found that searching for recipes is the most popular food-related online activity (68% of primary shoppers surveyed here reported doing this). Visiting food company websites is also popular (60% visit them), while half of respondents download grocery coupons from the web (52%) and receive email newsletters from food companies (50%). Additionally, 70% of respondents said that downloading coupons online would compel them to try a new food product. Other activities likely to compel new product usage included searching for recipes online (52%), visiting food company websites (46%) and receiving food-related email newsletters (43%).