First order of business for apps today: Keeping consumers searching in the app (Photo Illustration ... [+]
A funny thing happened this year as the open web turned 25: People started skirting that very same open web for searches and have chosen to get the answers they want from specialized closed-off gardens, shifting from querying an ever-expanding universe of information on the web to asking more specific, transactional “shopper/doer” searches in a smaller set of possible outcomes in app. Search is now all what I am labeling DTA—direct to app.
Fifty-six percent of U.S. consumers start their search shopping directly on Amazon or they’re searching on Walmart (37%), YouTube (25%), Instagram (19%) and TikTok (also 19%) for things they want to buy, things they want to see, and things they want to do. In fact, search engines now collectively account for only 14% of all product searches—3 out of 10 consumers say they prefer searching online marketplaces instead.
Even Tubi, the booming free ad-supported TV streaming service owned by Fox, has understood discovery is search—and search can be discovery that keeps customers within the app so they don’t go wandering off to other possible entertainment sources in their searches. When its 74 million users, who are obviously not averse to receiving advertisements, want to find something to watch out of Tubi’s 50,000+ movies and TV shows, they can forgo the traditional search engines that crawl across all the streamers and find what satisfies their watch itch via a GPT-4 mobile feature that Tubi is testing.
It’s a sea change in how we are searching, what we are searching for, why we are searching—and therefore how we find things. And it means all platforms are competitive search engines now.
TikTok, for example, is the search engine of choice for more than half (51%) of Gen Z and influences their purchase decisions more than any other platform thanks to the video format of the results and more relatable and personalized answers. It’s working so well, TikTok rolled out an online shop this fall that it hoped would outdo Amazon and Walmart on Black Friday with 50% discounts on product searches if you bought.
Following the already mentioned lead of Tubi, lots of other formerly entertainment destinations, shopping services, or just “sites” are now “search engine wanna-bes” leveraging AI-powered searches to keep users right where they are without losing them to the traditional search engines.
OpenAI’s Chat GPT (which already has 180.5 million users and kicked up a lot of headlines over its boardroom machinations) is itself even a search engine now: It uses Bing to search the web without your ever leaving the app.
Amazon is also planning to launch an AI-powered search engine on mobile. The company claims 78% to 80% of its searches are happening on mobile, but there’s a much lower conversion rate on mobile than on the web. The company is banking on AI to boost mobile conversions and improve the customer experience.
Walmart and Instacart are also adding enhancements to their searches. Walmart is using AI to understand context around searches so when you enter “toddler birthday party,” it assumes helpfully that you need decorations, party supplies and food. It’s also looking into how to harness large language models to create condensed review summaries and key product features for shoppers. Instacart, meanwhile, is adding a conversational search tool so consumers can ask open-ended questions like, “What do I need to make fish tacos for dinner?” And other retail media players are rushing to add AI as well, including Shopify, Chinese retailer JD.com, and Carrefour. Other sites like Indeed are adding AI to search for services such as finding a job, Etsy is adding it for customizing search results for handmade goods, and Shutterstock is adding AI to its image search so users can fully customize stock images. The list goes on and on. Just keep the users glued onto whatever site they are on, and don’t lose them to curiosity on the open web searches, seems to be the strategy of the day. Making search of course a completely different aspect of the web experience—and a kind of side door to compete against the open-web search engines that have, up til now, been so good at giving the kinds of returns that users want that competing with them on quality alone hasn’t made much of a dent. Until now with all these new ways to search.
Walmart is all in on retail media—and in-app search (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA ... [+]
Everything, and I mean every business, is a search engine now.
It turns out replacing the traditional search engines is pretty easy, as you can see from the hundreds of regular folks’ comments to an article that claimed it wasn’t. Comments like, “So easy - just open safari or edge or duck duck or firefox and off you go;” “after reading SO MANY comments telling us switching is easy, i wonder if the tech fix guru would like to change his stance?,” and perhaps most telling: “ Why would I want to switch?”
Media engagement is more of a transaction now, a series of micromoments for buying and doing stuff, than for gaining information or looking for insights as one once did in a newspaper, magazine or library. Consumers on their phones and on their computers don’t wait for what they want to be passively delivered—they are trained to search for products, services or entertainment. But they’re not doing it in such large percentages on the open web as they once did. The meaning there of course is that you as a marketer have to have a strategy and a media plan to reach your customers where you didn’t find them before.
Many companies optimize pages for open web search engines, so consumers are turning elsewhere to get a signal. (A recent ridiculous example: A restaurateur in Manhattan named his restaurant Thai Food Near Me hoping it would goose his listing in search engines. It’s a ploy dentists, plumbers, barbers and psychics have apparently also tried.)
The bottom line: Search is now done everywhere and is an essential way for brands to transact in the new media landscape where the marketing funnel no longer has the sequential process awareness to intent to purchase—all that marketing is accomplished simultaneously and sometimes in opposite order, and in one quick moment, on an app where you have to know where your buying consumers are.
