We tend to think of search audiences as encompassing all walks of life that use a computer. Very rarely do I run in to anyone who adjusts marketing spend based on the demographics of the engines themselves. We tend to believe that our keyword selection self-qualifies any visitors who may click on our ad when buying pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google, Yahoo, and the others.

This may be true to a point, but if you have a narrow demographic when it comes to your target customer, you may want to pay some attention to these number put out by HitWise concerning the demographic profile of search engine users.

Here are some notable stats. According to the HitWise study:

  • Google users were 53.6 percent male.
  • Ask Jeeves users were 58.7 percent female
  • MSN Search had the highest proportion of users older than 55
  • Google had the most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000.
  • Google, Yahoo!, and MSN users tend to enter just one or two words in the search box. An average of 87 percent of searches at those three engines are two words or less.
  • Ask Jeeves sends the largest proportion of searchers (8.55 percent) to business-related sites
  • Google, Yahoo!, and MSN accounted for 72.8 percent of visits to search engines and directories during the survey period

I ran across the study while reading Online Media Daily. You can view their entire piece here: Hitwise: Google Searchers Male, Yahoo! Skews Young.


Tagged as: Search Engines, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing