Demographic factors play a key role in web users’ perception about search engine relevance, and knowing the characteristics of the target audience can increase the likelihood of success for online campaigns, according to findings from iProspect.com Inc.`s Search Engine User Attitudes survey.
Women were more likely than men to find paid search ads to be relevant to their search queries. When shown a display of a paid versus a natural search result for a sample query across major engines Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN, 43.1% of women versus only 34.6% of men chose the paid search ad as the more relevant.
The survey also found that employment status was a factor in the perceived relevance of paid versus natural search results. 65% of fully employed survey respondents chose a natural search result as most relevant to a sample query, compared with 60.8% who were employed part-time and 55.1% of unemployed users.
Education also affected perceived relevance; with 64.8% of college graduates finding a natural search result more relevant, versus 56.2% of non-college graduates. Online tenure was another differentiator. Some 63.2% of those using the Internet for more than six years chose the natural search results, compared with 60.6% of those online for four to six years and only 54% of those with less than three years of online experience.
“Internet users identified natural search results as more relevant to their searches than paid search results,” says Fredrick Marckini, iProspect CEO. “But because of the roughly 60-40 split between natural search engine penetration and paid search ads, it was equally clear that failure to be found on both types of search results would be costly.”
IProspect’s Search Engine User Attitudes survey, based on 1,649 online survey respondents, was completed in March in partnership with WebSurveyor, Strategem Research and Survey Sampling International.
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