Among people who research products and services after seeing them advertised in newspapers, two-thirds (67 per cent) use the Internet to find more information. Of that group, nearly 70 per cent of consumers actually make a purchase following their additional research.
A study commissioned by Google, conducted by Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo shows that consumers trust ads appearing in newspapers, and many times look at both newspapers and the Internet to evaluate and make purchases, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has announced.
Newspaper readers respond to ads in their newspapers, the survey found. Some 56 per cent of the target market either researched or purchased at least one product they saw in the newspaper in the last month.
Readers rely on the Internet to perform further research on products they see in the newspaper. About 67 per cent of readers who researched products they saw in the newspaper did research online, illustrating how newspaper drives web traffic, the survey report said.
In mid-2007, Google commissioned the study of American print newspaper readers. The goal was to gather data exploring how newspaper readers respond to newspaper ads by going online.The survey was based on a random digit dialing telephone sample of 1,003 target adults. Target adults were regular print newspaper readers who use the Internet, and search engines, at least once a month.
Readers who do product research via the Internet after seeing newspaper ads often start at the product URL, but over 30 per cent of the time they start with a search engine. This corroborates the synergy between newspaper and search advertising, the report argued.
A significant percentage of people (about 52 per cent) say that seeing a product both online and in the newspaper would make them more likely to trust and purchase that product than seeing it in one media alone.
In the past month, 56 per cent had purchased or researched at least one product after seeing a newspaper advertisement. Some 44 per cent had researched, and 42 per cent had purchased (with some overlap). Of the 44% who had researched a product in the last month, most had researched at least three or four. On average, people had researched nine products or services (mean was nine; median was five).
The most popular way to perform further research was by going online. Roughly 67 per cent used the Internet to research products they had seen in the newspaper, more than used any other method.
When responding to newspaper ads via the web, 47 per cent went to product URLs first, but a full 31 per cent went to a search engine first, even though newspaper ads typically include product URLs. This demonstrates how newspaper drives customers to search campaigns.
