Nearly all consumers (97 percent) now use online media when researching products or services in their local area, according to research by BIA/Kelsey.

BIA/Kelsey’s research reveals that the most popular online tools for local purchase research are:

1. Search engines (used by 90 percent of consumers)
2. Internet Yellow Pages (48 percent)
3. Comparison shopping sites (42 percent)
4. Vertical sites (24 percent)

In addition, consumers use an average of 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services in their local area. This is an increase over the 6.5 sources used in 2009 and 5.8 in 2008. BIA/Kelsey attributes the growth in number of sources to greater audience fragmentation.

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• Search Engines and Email Drive More Traffic To Online Retailers Than Social Media
• U.S. Online Christmas Shopping Hits Record $32.6 Billion

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Ecommerce, Local Marketing, Market Research, News and Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.