Sarah Crawley-Boevey, Media Week, 28 August 2008, 3:00pm

Study reveals search habits for electronic goods

LONDON - Research into consumers' search behaviour when they buy electronic goods has revealed that people make fewer online searches when shopping for white goods, or brown goods such as TVs, stereos and cameras.

Electronic goods: fewer online searches made for white and brown goods

The data, which comes from research conducted by The Search Works with Yahoo and comScore, looked at the behaviour of 100,000 people on the comScore consumer panel and 150,000 key words, as well as a survey of 754 people.

Consumer electronics is the largest search category, making up 29% of all internet searches, and according to the survey, portable goods such as mobile phones and MP3 players, warrant four searches.

Furthermore, no more than 6% of consumers purchase goods during the initial search, while 14% of searches do not convert to sales until three months later.

The way people search was also touched on in the survey. Of all searches for portables, 89% were for specific brands and only 11% were for generic terms. However, in searches for white and brown goods, generic terms were used in more than 50% of cases.

The majority of searches for brown goods and portables took place at the beginning of the week, while the majority of people searched for white goods on Sundays.