Perhaps you've considered banner advertising, e-mail, print ads, and other avenues. Maybe you've wondered how these different advertising mediums compare with the search engines in effectiveness. The question you need answered is this, "how are people really finding Web sites?"

The Seventh WWW User Survey conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology (October 1997) answers this question:

"For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer. The primary method people find out about other sites is via search engines (86.34% Seventh Survey vs. 87.71% Sixth Survey) and other Web pages (84.63% vs. 86.92% Sixth). This continues the reversal from the Fifth Survey, where 90.7% reported finding out about Web pages from other Web pages and 83.1% from search engines. Printed media (62.47% Seventh vs. 67.95% Sixth), friends (56.92% Seventh vs. 56.66% Sixth), TV (30.20% Seventh vs. 35.54% Sixth), email signatures (31.23% Seventh vs. 30.01% Sixth), and Usenet Newsgroups (32.75% Seventh vs. 34.25% Sixth) remain other popular methods for finding out about other pages. The use of Usenet has declined 12 percentage points from the Fifth Survey (44.4%). As with the Sixth Survey, the younger generation is more likely to find out about other pages from friends, while the older generation make more use of printed media."

Notice that search engines remain the number one way that people find Web sites. This study demonstrates something most of you already know - don't underestimate the volume of traffic from good positions in the search engines!

I highly recommend that you review the Georgia Tech report yourself at:
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-04/graphs/

For those of you using your Website to actually transact business, the question is, "are people buying anything once they visit these Websites?"

Yup. They most certainly are coming with their wallets, and they're not afraid to spend that cash on your site if you present a good image.

A recent CNET report shows Internet sales are up 31 percent in the last quarter alone.

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