With SES-London less than a week away, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to some of the presenters and find out what we can expect at the conference next week. First up is Piers Stobbs, Vp of ComScore Europe, who’ll be on the Searcher Behaviour Research Update panel on Wednesday Feb 20th at 4pm.

Let’s start off by having you talk a little about your background, and about how someone with a degree in Physics ended up in marketing.
Long story;-) In what seems like a previous lifetime I was an oilfield engineer in the Middle East… I eventually decided I needed a job that didn’t require a hard hat, so ended up at business school in the US, and went from there into a number of different online startups. I then stumbled on comScore- I have always had an affinity for numbers and pulling the “so what” from disparate data sources and it proved to be an excellent fit. I’ve now been with the company five years, first in the US and then for the last two years heading up our custom research business here in London

So what does what ComScore Europe do?
We have a worldwide panel of 2 million online consumers and we passively track everything they do online. This generates a vast amount of incredibly useful data- everything from sites visited, items purchased, applications run and ads exposed to. We have a syndicated audience measurement service, Media Metrix which we sell on a licensing basis to media planners and online advertisers and publishers; we also conduct custom research projects based on the same underlying data sets.

Having worked in both the US and Europe, have you seen any particular differences in user behaviour in particular sectors that you find interesting?
I think the striking and somewhat surprising thing is that European online consumers and quite a bit more active than their US counter parts. For instance, in December, we estimate European searchers averaged almost 100 searches in the month, compared to under 80 in North America. The figure was even higher in the UK at 114. We see similar things across most metrics- total time online, pages viewed, videos streamed etc.

I think it’s due to a combination of cultural and structural reasons. Culturally, Europeans became used to searching more actively because the directory based portals originated in the US and were much less compelling a source of information in Europe. Structurally, the broadband market has been much more competitive in general- so while broadband penetration rates are comparable between the US and EU, you tend to get a lot more performance (upload and download speed) for your money in Europe. Not everything dubbed ‘broadband’ is the same!

Do you think that the increasing trend towards personalization of search results is affecting user behaviour?
I’m not sure about this yet. I think there has been a lot of speculation about how a combination of user generated/community generated search results combined with algorithmic results could significantly improve the user experience. I think the difficulty lies in the truly long tail nature of search, where by even the most popular individual queries are still only used by a small fraction of the online population- thus generating enough community volume in terms can be problematic. However, I do think there is significant potential, I’m just not sure it has been realized yet.

Any teasers you want to give for your presentation next Wednesday?
We have conducted some very interesting path to purchase research commissioned by Google – analyzing how consumers go about researching online travel, from the first search, through all subsequent searches and travel site visits all the way to online purchase. There are some very powerful findings for search marketers- including how long the process can take- 45% of online travel transactions occurred more than 4 weeks from the first search.

Which session at SES London, that you’re not involved with, are you most looking forward to attending?
The Analytics panel (1:30 on Tuesday) looks interesting; and it’s always good to check out the Keynote (3:30 Tuesday)

If you’re interested in hearing Piers and others talk at SES London, then there’s still time to register for the SES-London show, running from Tuesday Feb 19th until Thursday Feb 21st.

Filed under: Analytics, Education and Training, SEO on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | 2 Comments
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