Search… The beginning of everything
Almost 80% of all consumer decision making starts with an organic search. 80% of this traffic is information seeking, 10% is seeking travel or event information and 10% is intending to make a purchase.
Information Seeking (80% – 75% of this is non-branded search)
Seeking Event or Travel Information (10%)
Prospective Buyer (10%)
Search is still the number one traffic generator with a national average of 51% of all traffic to websites. Even strong brands have seen declines in direct traffic acquisition share as users more commonly type in the brand itself into a search engine like google instead of typing in www.ucdavis.edu or apple.com. For those seeking information, they typically don’t include a brand in their search unless they are seeking a specific “branded” product like an iPhone. With prospective buyer behavior limited to only 10% of search traffic you can see why non-branded search makes up 75% of information seeking search. This is why I focus my efforts on “non-branded organic search” (more to come on this topic in future posts…)
Quick answers (knowledge graph) taking over SERPS
Quick answers are what show up at the top of google searches, answering your questions. If you can win quick answers you can greatly increase your search traffic (many see between 20-40% increases in traffic). There is a set of key indicators to win quick answers such as being more direct in addressing common questions as well as providing direct step by step lists.
Micro moments and multi-tasking, social and beyond
There are 30 billion micro moments per day on mobile, each person having potentially hundreds of micro moments each day.
Shopping micro moments
90% of in store visitors use their mobile device while in a store.
A tool for shopping: many of these shoppers use their mobile device to see if they can find a better deal online or to get coupons for the store they are visiting.
A tool for killing time: You can witness shopping partners killing some time using their phone while their friend is doing the shopping or as you are waiting in line. The last time I was in a Chipotle, nearly 3/4 of the line were on their smart phone killing time.
TV micro moments
57% of TV watchers use their mobile devices while watching a show. Social companies like Twitter are trying to capitalize on this as seen in Twitter’s integration with Apple TV. We’ll see how this evolves as the TV markets have continually been seeing shifts in consumer behavior.
Social dominance on mobile
Facebook currently sees 1.7 billion visits monthly and 500 million visits per month on Instagram which together accounts for 20% of all mobile activity on the web. If you look at native mobile apps there are only a handful of apps most people use everyday. For most companies that are not part of this handful of apps, they will typically have a small percentage of faithful users using their app regularly. All other users will simply use the website for that organization/company as needed. This is why Google encourages and ultimately favors progressive enhancement and progressive web apps which are more likely to be used than your native mobile app.
Conclusion
There is no doubt about it that search dominates in the traffic acquisition game with non-branded information seeking behavior being the most common. With quick answers on the rise and seemingly ever volatile, this will be something to keep an eye on over the next couple years. As consumer behavior continues to be overwhelmed by wearables and smart devices, micro moment behavior will become the lion share of traffic. These are all things we will need to keep a pulse on over the next few years ahead.
Have any questions or looking for an answer to something…? Make a comment and I’ll respond or write a blog post about it.