Search and Email Still Dominate Online Activities, New Study Finds

By Rieva Lesonsky

The best way to market to your customers online is to know what they’re doing on the Web. And according to the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, search and email still dominate the list of online activities for most Americans.

These two activities not only top the list of most commonly engaged in Internet uses, but are nearly universal. Ninety-two percent of online adults use search engines to find information online and the same number use email. In fact, Pew notes, since the Pew Internet Project began measuring Internet use in the last decade, email and search have consistently ranked as the most popular actions despite the new platforms and devices affecting Internet usage.

The biggest change Pew notes is that both activities have become more habitual. In 2011, about 60 percent of online adults used search and email on a typical day; in 2002, 49 percent used email each day and just 29 percent used search daily.

Search Stats

Search engine use is most popular among the youngest users (age 18-29): 96 percent of people in this age group use search engines.  But even among the oldest Internet users (age 65+), 87 percent use search engines and 37 percent use them daily.

Aside from age, college-educated and higher-income adults are slightly more likely to use search and to use it daily.

Email Activity

Somewhat surprisingly to me, the youngest online adults (18-29) were most likely to use email. Beyond that, college-educated and higher-income Internet users were more likely to use email.

There were some interesting differences between overall email use and daily use. While white, African-American and Hispanic online adults have similar levels of overall email use, white adults were significantly more likely than African-American or Hispanic users to use email daily (63 percent v. 48 percent v. 53 percent, respectively).

What do these figures mean to you? While there are many ways to target your audience, this study shows that some good old online methods—including email newsletters, email offers, SEO and other search-related means such as using local ratings and review sites—are still very viable at reaching even the youngest and “hippest” Internet users.

Image by Flickr user Sean McEntee (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Generational Marketing, Marketing, Search Marketing, Small Business, small business. 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.