Sally Falkow looked at the phenomenon last year, referring to research from comScore, Procter & Gamble, Yahoo, and SEMPO. Highlights she pointed out about the motivation of searchers were:

- 30% were looking specifically for the company Web site

– 73% were researching products

– 64% were seeking help with an actual purchase decision

-  Almost 50% were looking for product promotions

Now, as I said, this data is a little outdated, but it’s really not the percentages that we need to worry about so much, because these are all things that should be taken into account when CPG businesses plan their Internet marketing strategies.

These are the things people look for. They want to know details about products before they buy them. They want to see if they can find deals on products so they can get them for cheaper. They want reviews of products so they can determine whether or not they wish to purchase them. They will often go to the company’s site to find their product.

So What Can You Do With This Information?

- You can make your site more usable.

– You can offer customer discounts

– You can provide plenty of details and testimonials on product pages and throughout your site.

– You can monitor customer reviews of your products for reputation management.

– You can listen to what these reviews say and make improvements where you feel necessary.

ComScore’s Eli Goodman spoke with our reporter Abby Johnson at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, where the two of them discussed some opportunites for CPG markters:

It’s really all about visibility, usability, and reputation. If you can manage these things in you marketing campaigns, customers will have a better experience, and so will you. Seasoned pros know this, but  for many struggle remains.

When conducting research for consumer packaged goods (CPG) online 27 percent of consumers say they prefer e-newsletters followed by 25 percent who favor search tools. Fourteen percent said they used general saving and shopping sites along with branded product sites.

When asked what online resource they would most likely sign up for/join to receive product information and promotional offers 47 percent said branded CPG e- newsletters, followed by branded CPG Web sites (39%) and online community/forum (14%).

When researching products online 48 percent said they were looking for information about the product, forty-six percent wanted savings on the product and just six percent wanted tips on how to use the product.

"These poll results show that there are tremendous opportunities for CPG marketers to reach consumers online, especially through branded e-Newsletters," said Jere Doyle, President and CEO of Prospectiv. 

"General savings and shopping sites as well as branded product sites can also attract consumer interest provided CPG marketers focus on populating these sites with product information, product savings offers and tips on how to use specific products."
 

All of the top ten positions were held by food or beverage brands. The average visitor made 3.9 visits to sites within the CPG category, viewing 10.5 pages per visit, and spending an average of 9 minutes per site visit.

KraftFoods.com was the leader in the category with 10.5 million visitors (up 8 percent over last year), followed my MyCokeRewards.com with 8.6 million visitors (up from just 66,000 visitors a year ago), and Millsberry.com, a kids site from General Mills, with 5 million visitors (up 11 percent).

A number of other brand sites did well in the category during the past year. Candy sites attracted a significant number of visitors, including Wrigley’s candystand.com (up 1 percent to about 3.8 million visitors), MyMMs.com (up 79 percent to 2.3 million visitors), and Hersheys.com (up 12 percent to 2.1 million visitors).

UncleBens.com increased from just 191,000 visitors a year ago to 3.6 million visitors this year, using targeted banner ads on Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com that attracted close to 2 million visits to the site. Pampers.com ranked as the 12th most visited site in the CPG category, drew 1.7 million visitors with its interactive site focused on baby development and parenting advice.

"To date, most CPG marketers have been reluctant to move a significant portion of their marketing budgets online because the Internet is not a primary sales channel for their products," said Carolina Petrini, senior vice president of consumer packaged goods solutions at comScore.

"However many brands have found success by attracting a wide audience online through effective promotions and site activities that appeal to consumers’ lifestyles. Savvy brand marketers are beginning to understand the importance of the online channel as a means of engaging consumers, which will ultimately lead to offline sales."

Ever desperate to follow the wandering eyes of an increasingly hard to reach consumer base, brand names are on the verge of spending much more money for online advertising in 2008. A report by eMarketer said that spending will finish around $920 million for 2007.

By the time 2011 rolls to a close, eMarketer predicts $1.81 billion in online ad spending by the CPG market. That represents a compound annual growth rate of nearly 21 percent.

Internet users perform plenty of product research online. Their willingness to buy CPG products online has changed, as Lisa Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst, said. “The CPG industry as a whole is suddenly bullish on the Internet.”

Online ad spending by CPG companies reached $310 million in the first half 2006, finishing the year at $700 million. eMarketer had predicted $470 million for all of 2006 CPG Internet ad activity.

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Tasty Advertising Key For Food Retailers

Turkey Day arrives in a couple of days, soon to be followed by plenty of holiday cheer through the end of 2007. Like other businesses, those who focus on food and its attendant items have the chance to take advantage of the increased interest with their marketing.

Google CPG blog cited Hitwise in naming the top US searches for turkey-related queries through November 16th. ‘Turkey’ and ‘deep fried turkey’ rated one and two, the latter a relatively recent phenomenon fueled by every cook’s desire to make a juicier bird for the feast.

Since the Thanksgiving bird shares a name with the country Turkey, Google advised that food retailers take advantage of negative keyword filtering to keep their ads from appearing in searches for ‘map’ or ‘country’ in Turkey queries.

Google also noted ‘deep fried turkey’ seems to be appearing more regularly than just ‘turkey’ in food-related queries. People also search for ‘dressing’ and ‘stuffing’ almost equally, which should tip advertisers to include both keywords in their food-related ads.

When December comes along, desserts should be the major point of interest for searchers, as Google noted their popularity in December 2006. Ad campaigns focusing on that interest should yield delicious results for advertisers.

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Food-related searches topped search interest during the study period, three months ending April 2007. Almost 44 million food product searches took place, followed by 15.7 million searches for baby products, and 9.8 million for personal care.

Those searches drive people to websites in those categories, as measured by comScore. 60 percent of baby product visits started with a search result. In the food category, 47 percent of site visitors came from search, while 27 percent did so for personal care products.

“While search marketing has long been recognized as an effective direct response vehicle, it’s been largely overlooked by CPG companies who focus on brand advertising and promotional efforts to drive in-store purchasing,” commented Gord Hotchkiss, Chairman of SEMPO.

“This study seeks to demonstrate the potential brand-building impact of search for CPG marketers.”

Over eight in ten respondents in the Deloitte study who read consumer reviews said that they had impacted their buying intentions. They were either more determined to make a purchase or had second thoughts and made a different purchase.

Pat Conroy, vice chairman and US consumer products group leader at Deloitte Touche USA, said, "This increasing market transparency can adversely impact the margins, market share and brand equity of consumer products companies."

"Consumers are increasingly empowered, everyone has a voice, and information and opinions are instantly dispersed," he said. "Consumer product companies need to determine how best to capitalize on this new landscape."

In a separate study conducted by Deloitte in August with Sterling Commerce they found that 42 percent of U.S. online shoppers believed that having consumer reviews on Web sites increased trust in the sites.

Only 32 percent of U.S. ecommerce sites allow consumers to post reviews, according to an Internet Retailer Vovici study, the rest of the sites that do not allow consumer reviews are missing out on the opportunity to build site trust.

Heather Hopkins, a vice president of research at Hitwise UK, discovered the trend.  “UK Internet searches for funny videos started to pick up just before YouTube [developed] much brand recognition in February and March 2006," she wrote.  "Once YouTube started to take off, we saw a precipitous decline in UK internet searches for ‘funny videos’ as illustrated in the chart below.”

Go look at the graph on the Hitwise blog, or take my word for it – searches for “funny videos” are approaching zero even as “youtube” queries continue to climb.

Again, Google can’t be sorry to see this happening, but the data may indicate one thing about YouTube: it’s still largely a sort of online AFV.  Despite all the political content that’s been uploaded in recent months, despite a recent Google CPG Blog post about “how to” videos, YouTube’s where a lot of people go to see guys get hit in the crotch.

Oh, well.  As a Monty Python fan, I can’t really claim the comic high ground.  Long live the fish slapping dance!

The Google CPG blog cited a study by aQuantive’s Atlas Institute about the value of overlapping ads. By running ads in multiple points of contact – publishers, portals, and ad networks – Atlas found 67 percent of people who took action did so after encountering multiple ad placements.

Google’s Emma McKeithen noted how they do this for Google’s CPG clients, and gave an example of how a given person might navigate the Internet on a typical day:

During the course of a day, a user might visit a sports site, a social network, a photo-sharing site, check Gmail (perhaps repeatedly) in addition to going elsewhere online. The goal of overlapping campaigns is to maximize these touchpoints without increasing frequency to the point where an ad placement no longer delivers returns for the marketer.

Atlas did caution that overlap’s impact on conversions will “differ greatly from advertiser to advertiser as there is no consistent correlation between reach and conversion overlap.”

By Atlas’ notes, overlap seems to work best for branding, and requires a targeted reach to be most effective. A danger exists for overexposure of the brand through such overlap, which means advertisers will want to watch for opportunities to swap overlap for superior demographic reach.