With regards to statistics that seem akin to closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, new research shows that more than half of relevant ad impressions occur after a tech purchase has been made.
Digital content and commerce company Purch and analytics company comScore recently teamed up to ascertain what kinds of searches, ads, and content consumers interact with before and after making a tech purchase. Findings point to inefficiencies in ad delivery and consumer focus on tech reviews and content both ahead of and after making a purchase.
“PURCHase Report: Consumer Technology”—which examined more than 3,000 tech purchases in 11 categories on desktop and mobile devices over a 90-day period—finds that 52% of tech ad impressions take place after the consumer has already made a purchase. Such a finding behooves marketers, as they can retune ad strategy and messaging to consumers to place the right ads at the right phase in the consumer journey.
“It’s critical for brands and marketers to gain a detailed understanding of the many factors that influence a consumer shopping for a tech product,” said Erin Kapczynski, VP of marketing at Purch, in a release. “The Purch and comScore PURCHase Report goes a long way toward providing a more comprehensive understanding of the consumer path to purchase and helps marketers and publishers better service them via advertising, search, and editorial. The media landscape is saturated, but tech content stands out as a go-to resource in the month before consumers land directly at online retail destinations to make purchases.”
Additional findings from the report—which analyzed search, ad exposure, visitation, mobile, and e-commerce—include:
Tech yourself before you wreck yourself
On the content side, tech media sites are the most widely consumed content throughout the pre- and post-purchase journey—this exemplifies a trust in product reviews and testing by neutral parties which relay info. Multi-category retailer and tech retailer sites trail tech media site consumption.
Reviews over news
On tech media sites, buyers peruse 80% more reviews/buying guide pages than news pages. Both reviews and news article readership were split fairly even by platform, with 53% of page views on desktops and 47% on mobile devices.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus
Men dominate tech forums, while women consume a slight majority of tech how-to pages. However, the genders are evenly split when it comes to time spent on reviews/buying guides.
Gen X buys more tech, but millennials still outspend
Gen X consumers accounted for 45% of the tech purchases, although millennials spent an average of 8% more per purchase.
