Web users are becoming more sophisticated in navigating the Internet, relying less on search to get where they want to go, says a new report from San Diego-based WebSideStory Inc.’s StatMarket. Today, 52% of Internet users worldwide go directly to sites either by typing a URL or accessing it from a bookmark while the remainder access sites through search engine results. A year ago, 46% of users went directly to sites and 53% relied on search. In the U.S., 58% use direct navigation methods, up from 50% a year ago.
To take advantage of this trend, online retailers need to make sure they have a strong brand and an easy-to-use URL, says Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for StatMarket. “Brands are making more and more of an impact on the web,” he says. “If you’re a retailer, you better have your name at a dot-com domain, and one that’s easy to remember. If you have to use a hyphen, you may not get the traffic you want.”
While retailers have relied heavily on affiliate marketing to drive traffic, the fact that shoppers are surfing less may mean that the importance of affiliates will wane, Johnston says. “Random users are less likely to trip across the grass-root sites,” Johnston says. “Retailers may need to slowly scale back their expectations about what an affiliate marketing program can do for them.”
Simply surfing the web has fallen out of favor as consumers rely more on the web to accomplish specific tasks. “Surfing then Net was often like rummaging through a second-hand store; you can spend an hour there and still not find what you’re looking for,” Johnston says. “Today, they know where they want to go and they go there.” Furthermore, random browsing has often resulted in frustrating experiences, such as hitting sites that bombard the user with pop-up windows, or that trap a user and won’t allow the user to back up, Johnston says.
Adding to the rise in directed navigation are the more advanced browsers that consumers have today that, for instance, will call up an entire URL when a users types in just a letters, Johnston says.
StatMarket publishes information gathered from more than 80 million Internet users a day to more than 125,000 sites worldwide using WebSideStory's HitBox Enterprise, HitBox Commerce, and other HitBox e-business intelligence services. The service segments information from visitors in 245 countries and 120 industry categories.
The percentages of users who navigate vs. surf varies between countries. In Germany and Japan, 63% and 71% of Internet users respectively use direct navigation and bookmarks, compared to 54% and 60% a year ago.
Back...
