• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 28, 2016

Compete, a Millward Brown Division, recently released its 2016 State of Search report. The findings, based on clickstream data, show that search engine traffic on desktops rose 12% since 2015, although numerous other reports suggest a movement to mobile.

The total time spent with search engines rose by nearly 24% since last year, amounting to more than 111 billion minutes spent on search engines a month.

While the time in aggregate consumers spent using search engines rose, Compete's data flags a 17% drop in the average stay on search engines for each visit. Apparently that means when someone goes to a search engine to look for information, they find it much faster today than in the past.

The Compete data also suggests that since 2013 paid-search referrals to the Apparel category have increased by more than 50% for most major brands, resulting in a total growth of 67% for the category over two years.

The report doesn’t include mobile data -- although Google now sees a larger percentage of search activity on mobile devices -- but it does focus on content for organic search results. Non-branded keywords are an important indicator of purchase intent, so an understanding the keywords driving traffic helps to guide a brand’s content strategy and strengthen search engine optimization (SEO).

The integration of social to support content and organic search continues to rise. Compete points to the term "casper mattress," which drives 45% of search traffic to the retailer's Web site. The first results page for "casper mattress" contains several customer-created YouTube mattress unboxing videos.