Retail importance of search continues to grow!

"Dieringer noted that 114.1 million adults searched for product information on the web last year, and that 98.9 million of this group went on to make purchases either online or offline. By comparison, 106.7 million adults made purchases through catalogs, direct-mail and telemarketing, it added."

According to this information, the web has overtaken several traditional avenues of marketing.

'Our research shows that the Internet now influences the purchase decisions of as many shoppers as mail order catalogs, direct mail, and telemarketing combined.' "

This information reinforces again the fact that the marketplace served by search engine marketing is a significant and growing part of retail activity around the world.

More confirmation of the continuing impact of the Internet on business!

"According to a report by ActivMedia Research, despite the gloom-and-doom of many pure dot-com's, the websites that are part of the 'Click-and-Brick' crowd, offering e-commerce sites in addition to existing physical locations, see Internet revenues playing an increasingly dominant role in their companies through 2003. For the 76 percent of online companies that also sell offline, the so-called 'click-and-brick' businesses, one-third of revenues came from connections made on the Internet in 2001, and nearly half of all revenues for these companies arrived from online contacts in 2002.

In the report entitled E-Survivors, ActivMedia found that while 'click-and-brick' companies may not seem daring compared with the high-flying 'dot-coms,' each year they accrue increasing revenue from their online efforts. According to the more than 500 online business executives that took part in this new research, growth rates for Internet contributions to 'click-and-brick' business will continue to rise to become a majority of all company revenues in 2003. According to Harry Wolhandler, VP at ActivMedia Research, 'Companies that are not participating in the online growth spurt are losing share to those that are already online. Like it or not, the Internet is a fact of life for competitive business in the future. Mainstream businesses that create an effective synthesis of on-and-offline strategies are going to reap the benefits. Now that the dot-com's have turned into dot-bombs, the picture of what it takes to survive online is becoming much clearer.'

This report deals with the Office Products market, but the conclusions sound like they could be applied to every line of business. The importance to us (in the internet marketing field) is that the market is still growing rapidly and the importance of the Internet to business continues to grow.