Google is where the boys are, and we’re not talking about Larry and Sergey.
A recent study of June comScore data by Internet Retailer contains some interesting revelations on search engine user demographics.
Among the findings:
- Gender Divide Men are slightly more likely to use Google (51.5% of users are male) compared to Yahoo & MSN (49%), AOL Search (48%) and Ask Jeeves (46%). The differences seem small, but when you’re looking at numbers on this big a scale, even the tiniest percentage is major.
- Primed to Buy Google users are 42% more likely to buy online than the average Internet user, a big lead over Yahoo visitors at 31%. MSN is the closest competitor (48%) and AOL is left out in the dust, with users just 3% more likely to make a purchase than the average online user.
- Who Knows Big Words? Portals like AOL and Yahoo tend to receive simple queries that often don’t result in a direct conversion. Google users enter more complex search queries that are more likely to result in a direct conversion.
Of course all these results should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly the last one. There’s a long latency period that needs to be taken into account. As comScore President James Lamberti says,
“There’s a lot of latent value to search marketing that is still not fully captured today.”
