Tag Archive for: consumer behavior

Local businesses are often the most hesitant about investing time and money into getting their business online, but recent studies are overwhelmingly showing that businesses without an online presence are missing out on huge opportunities, especially with the growing-number of smartphone-savvy consumers.

First, comScore found that 78 percent of local-mobile searches resulted in an online purchase. Now, new consumer data from Ipsos MediaCT, a research firm sponsored by Google, confirms many of comScore’s data and also finds that local search may be important in more phases of the buying cycle than previously thought.

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Ipsos collected the data through an online survey of 4,500 consumers from nine vertical segments including Auto, CPG, Finance, Local Services, Media & Entertainment, Restaurant, Retail, and Tech and Travel. The firm also reviewed and incorporated data from a smartphone shopper diary study involving 653 respondents.

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Perhaps the most eye-raising finding of the survey is the news that 88 percent of smartphone users and 84 percent of tablet users conduct local searches, specifically focusing on hours, directions, address, and product availability queries.

The survey also refutes the common belief that local search tends to only occur in the last phase of the buying cycle. Instead, like comScore, Ipsos found that local search was used at all phases of the buying cycle, even at home.

Local businesses will also be particularly interested in finding that the majority (56 percent) of “on the go” searches carried local intent. However, this does not mean that more than half of all mobile searches are local.

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You can work on building your brand’s image and marketing as much as you want, but at the end of the day bad reviews can outweigh all that hard work. We’d all like to believe that good reviews can balance out the negative, however that notion got pretty well shattered when Mike Blumenthal recently published a set of surveys strongly showing that consumers perceive that a “negative review corpus hurts a business more than positive reviews help them.

For businesses struggling with the issue of negative reviews, this news isn’t a relief. However, Blumenthal reviewed his results and noticed something interesting. Younger consumers seem to be more tolerant of bad reviews than their older counterparts.

Of course, younger consumers aren’t going to forgive a place with an outstanding number of one star reviews. But, it appears that consumers between the ages of 18-24, specifically those who are more savvy to online reviews, may be able to parse negative reviews more thoroughly rather than rejecting businesses out of hand. Rather than accepting the review at face value, they actively search for aspects that could be a deal breaker.

Obviously, the best way to handle a bad review portfolio is to directly address any valid concerns of reviewers, and encourage those who have positive experiences to review your site so that you can potentially water down the negative. But, Blumenthal’s survey suggests that reviews are always the end-all-be-all that we think they are.

By now you may have heard the claims that internet traffic from smartphones and tablets will outpace traffic coming from desktop computers any day now, but yet a large amount of the internet isn’t optimized for mobile devices in any viable way. If you’ve ever wondered why, it is because many businesses don’t see the value of investing in mobile traffic, due to lack of information and misunderstandings of their audience and the market.

The question most businesses need answered isn’t “how much traffic is coming from mobile devices?” If we spent all the time that has been used answering that question every few months on instead answering “how valuable is all that mobile traffic” most businesses of every size would already have perfectly usable mobile websites.

It is true that the mobile market is constantly growng, but the most interesting data is how mobile internet users are doing online. Compared to desktop traffic, mobile users are exponentially more likely to take action. People tend to do in-depth research and general browsing on desktop systems, so each visitor you receive is as likely to politely look around and leave as they are to convert. In fact, they are statistically much more likely to not take action.

However, each study on the consumption behavior of smartphone users only shows that people are using their phones more and more to purchase or take action every day. The latest study from comScore.com and Search Engine Watch says 80% of local searches coming from mobile phones lead to conversions.

There are a few industries that benefit the most from these conversions, as mobile searches for localized results tend to favor restaurant, auto service, and arts queries. You can read the whole breakdown of the report at Search Engine Watch, but if you are a local business owner who has been telling yourself that mobile websites only benefit major businesses you are likely selling yourself short.

The team from Neustar also created an infographic highlighting the results of the study, which can be seen below:

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