Digital 2023 Deep-Dive: The ongoing evolution of search behaviours
At the start of 2022, we explored a number of trends in the world’s online search behaviours.
However, in a stark reminder that historical trends aren’t always a reliable indicator of future behaviour, those trends didn’t evolve quite as we expected over the rest of the year.
In some instances, change has accelerated, such as in the rising adoption of social search and discovery.
But in other cases – like the use of voice assistants – we’ve actually seen a reversal of the growth that we saw at the start of 2022.
So what’s really going on in the world of search?
Let’s start with some context.
Search continues to dominate online ad spend
Analysis from Statista reveals that search ads continued to account for the largest share of digital advertising spend in 2022.
Data published in the company’s Advertising & Media Outlook indicates that spend on search ads equated to 39 percent of worldwide digital ad spend in 2022.
That share figure is up very slightly compared with the 38.9 percent we saw in 2021, but is lower than the 41.8 percent share that search attracted back in 2017.
However, absolute spend on search ads has continued to increase.
The world’s marketers spent a total of USD $260 billion on search ads in 2022, which equated to a 15.4 percent year-on-year increase (+$35 billion) compared with 2021 spend.
But Statista’s data also shows that the popularity of search ads varies significantly from country to country.
For example, while 39 percent of worldwide digital ad spend can be attributed to search ads, Statista reports that this figure rises to almost 56 percent in New Zealand, but drops to below 10 percent of digital ad spend in Nigeria.
Search Advertising's Share Of Total Digital Advertising By Country January 2023 DataReportal
But the overall importance of search comes through clearly in the revenues earned by the world’s top digital advertising companies.
Ad revenues by platform
Alphabet continues to dominate Insider Intelligence’s ranking of digital ad revenues by platform, with the analysts forecasting that Google will earn a total of USD $168.44 billion in revenue across its various ad products in 2022.
Search ads still dominate Google’s advertising revenues too, with Alphabet’s Q3 2022 investor earnings announcement showing that search ads accounted for more than 70 percent of total ad revenues – and that’s including YouTube.
For context, this latest share figure suggests that Google’s search business alone is worth more than Meta’s entire ad-supported portfolio.
Meanwhile, although its revenues don’t quite match Google’s, Baidu’s USD $10.33 billion offers another valuable perspective on the importance of search, even in a market where large amounts of activity occur within one “super app” (WeChat / 微信).
But search behaviours are changing, and this may signal a change in where advertisers will – and “should” – invest their budgets.
Changing the question
Google’s own teams are increasingly worried about changes in the ways people search for – and increasingly, “discover” – information online.
For context, as we show in our Digital 2023 Global Overview Report, “finding information” remains the primary reason why the world’s working-age internet users go online.
However, as GWI’s Tom Morris notes in the company’s insightful 2023 “Connecting the Dots” report,
“Finding information doesn’t quite mean the same thing it used to. Social media algorithms can surface it before we even know what we’re looking for.”
Despite these ongoing changes though, GWI’s data reveals that search engines remain the primary source of brand discovery amongst online adults.
At a worldwide level, 30.6 percent of internet users aged 16 to 64 still say that they find new products and services through search, ahead of the 30.2 percent that say they discover new brands via TV ads [note that respondents could choose more than one option in response to this question].
However, GWI’s data also reveals that the number of people selecting search engines in response to this question has declined steadily over recent years.
Somewhat surprisingly, that’s true across all five of the top answer in this question – including TV ads, social media ads, and even word of mouth – but this finding still has important implications for marketers.
But perhaps the most important finding here relates to sources of brand discovery across age groups.
Search engines continue to dominate amongst internet users aged 25 to 54, but GWI’s data clearly shows that they play a lesser role amongst internet users aged 16 to 24.
And critically, GWI’s data shows that people in this younger age group are now more likely to discover new products and services via social media ads than they are to learn about them via search engines.
However, this isn’t news to Google executives, as evidenced in a quote in this article in TechCrunch:
“Younger users are often turning to apps like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google Search or Maps for discovery”.
The quote, attributed to Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organisation, goes on to say:
“We keep learning, over and over again, that new internet users don’t have the expectations and the mindset [to which] we have become accustomed… The queries they ask are completely different.”
Raghavan went on to note that people who have only recently started to use the internet are significantly less likely to type queries into a search box, instead relying on more “immersive” sources of discovery:
“In [Google] studies… almost 40 percent of young people – when they’re looking for a place for lunch – they don’t go to Google Maps or Search; they go to TikTok or Instagram.”
The TechCrunch article qualifies that this stat relates to a Google survey of 18 to 24 year-olds in the United States.
And given that internet users in the US only account for 6.7 percent of the global user total, this specific finding may not be representative of the behaviours and trends that we’d see elsewhere in the world.
The continuing rise of social search
However, our analysis of various data points suggests that it may be more representative than Google execs might hope.
For example, “social search” behaviours are becoming increasingly prevalent.
We’ve been tracking this trend for a few years in our Global Digital Reports, but recent data indicates that these behaviours have been gaining ever greater momentum.
For example, this time last year, only internet users aged 16 to 24 were more likely to turn to social networks than search engines when researching products and services.
But in GWI’s latest wave of research, data confirms that this is now also true of younger Millennials, with 25 to 34 year-olds also more likely to prefer social networks when researching brands online.
But what’s driving this evolution?
In her article in GWI’s 2023 “Connecting the Dots” report, Shauna Moran offers some valuable insight:
“Younger audiences start their search from a place of curiosity and expect to be led down a fun rabbit hole of new ideas, rather than be directed to a list of brands or products.”
This suggests that younger internet users are looking for more serendipitous discovery, in addition to looking for more “conventional” answers to predefined questions.
And one way for marketers to approach these shifting expectations is to rethink the somewhat didactic paradigm of conventional online search.
Rather than trying to deliver a single, all encompassing answer, brands may have greater success if they help people to learn and discover answers for themselves.
For example, in contrast to the hierarchical ranking of search engine results pages (SERPs), search results on social media tend to be a lot more “messy”, offering searchers a variety of different kinds of answers and perspectives.
Moreover, on platforms like TikTok, users can quickly and easily identify whether a search result reflects – or is at least relevant to – “people like me”.
That’s in quite stark contrast to the relatively anonymous nature of the results we see in SERPs, where searchers need to open various different links before they can identify whether the results are really what they’re looking for.
Actively researching brands
It’s also worth stressing that many people actively visit social media platforms with the specific intention of learning about brands.
For example, GWI’s data reveals that “finding products to purchase” is one of the primary reasons why adults use social media, with more than a quarter of worldwide survey respondents selecting this option [note that people could choose more than one option].
More broadly, roughly half of all working-age social media users say that they visit social platforms to learn more about brands and to see their content.
However, this figure rises to more than 6 in 10 across a number of world’s largest countries, including Indonesia, Brazil, and the Philippines.
Women are more likely than men to use social media when researching brands, as are people in their 20s and 30s compared with people in other age groups.
However, the data reveal that more than one-third of men between the ages of 55 and 64 also use social platforms when looking for information about brands, so these behaviours are not exclusive to younger users.
Interestingly, Instagram ranks top when it comes to the social media platforms that people use to research brands, with more than 6 in 10 active users saying that they use Instagram for this purpose
Facebook ranks second in terms of the share of its users who visit the platform to learn about brands, and it’s worth highlighting that this data suggests Facebook attracts the greatest absolute number of “social searchers”.
It’s also interesting to note that a disproportionate share of Pinterest’s users visit the platform to learn about brands, which suggests that the pinboard platform continues to offer compelling opportunities for marketers – especially those hoping to reach women in their 20s and 30s.
But despite regular claims that #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, the short-video platform’s users appear to be less likely to visit the platform specifically to research brands, at least compared with platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
A decline in voice search
One of the more unexpected results in this year’s report relates to an apparent decline in the number of people using voice assistants like Siri and Alexa to find information.
This time last year, more than 24 percent of worldwide internet users between the ages of 16 and 24 said that they used a voice assistant to find information in the preceding seven days.
But in GWI’s latest wave of research, that figure has fallen below 22 percent.
Relatively speaking, the year-on-year 2.4 percentage-point decline means there’s been a relative drop of 10 percent in the share of internet users who’re using voice search each week.
The fastest decline has occurred in the world’s largest internet market, with China seeing use of voice search fall from almost 33 percent of working-age internet users at the start of 2022, to just over 27 percent today.
The 5.7 percentage-point drop equates to a 17 percent relative decline in voice search usage in China, and means that the country has fallen to second place in the global ranking for voice search use, behind India.
Use Of Voice Assistants To Find Information By Country January 2023 DataReportal
However, these declines are not consistent across all of the countries surveyed in GWI’s research.
For example, we’ve seen increases in voice search use in a number of countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.
It’s also worth stressing that the overall decline in the use of voice search mirrors a broader decline in various online activities in recent months, and these changes may in part be due to the more “purposeful” use of the internet that we explored in our Digital 2023 Global Overview Report.
For context, while voice search is certainly a powerful tool, the fact that search results tend to be limited to just one answer makes these tools less useful for anything other than relatively simple “knowledge” questions (e.g. “what’s the capital of Uruguay?”).
However, there may be other reasons why voice search has declined.
For example, voice search might have enjoyed increased use at the height of COVID-19, when people were keen to avoid touching their phones.
But as the pandemic situation has improved, and as people’s behaviours have returned towards something similar to what we saw pre-pandemic, use of voice search tools may have waned.
It’s important to stress that voice search is not “dead” though, and data suggests that roughly 1 billion internet users still rely on voice assistants to find information every week.
However, with companies like Amazon reportedly reducing their investments in voice assistant technology, it’s unclear whether we’ll see usage rebound again in the near future.
It is worth considering that new devices and interfaces may influence the fate of voice assistants though, especially if we see a rise in devices that rely less on touchscreens and pointers.
Use of image recognition tools dips
Meanwhile, another of the search trends that we saw growing this time last year has also reversed over more recent months.
At the start of 2022, 29.5 percent of working-age internet users said that they’d used an image recognition tool like Google Lens or Pinterest Lens on their mobile phone in the preceding 30 days.
However, that figure has fallen to 28.4 percent today, although it’s worth noting that GWI’s most recent wave of data does show a slight increase in use during the most recent quarter.
It’s also important to stress that use of image recognition tools remains high in a number of countries, especially across Latin America.
Usage may have dropped slightly in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, but almost half of all surveyed internet users in these countries say that they’re still using image recognition tools each month.
Meanwhile, use of these tools has actually increased across a number of European countries over the past year, including the UK and Germany.
We’ve also seen an increase in a few South-East Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Vietnam.
The outlook for image recognition tools remains promising too, especially if rumours of “smart spectacles” products from companies like Apple turn out to be true.
AI and the future of search
But one of the hottest digital trends over recent weeks has been the rapid rise in the use of AI tools like ChatGPT.
Company statements show that it took just five days for ChatGPT to attract 1 million sign ups, but given the media’s continued coverage of these tools, and the associated excitement in social feeds, it’s highly possible that this user figure is now considerably higher.
AI tools like ChatGPT offer much more than just search functionality of course, but their ability to consolidate and condense huge amounts of information – and then present that information in easily digestible outputs – makes them ideally suited to a wide variety of search-related needs.
As with all powerful new technologies, there are various concerns about the potential impact of these tools, especially when it comes to impacting human jobs.
Legal and ethical considerations are also high on the agenda, and it will be interesting to see how these debates unfold over the coming months.
However, there’s no debating the potential that these tools offer.
For example, when I asked ChatGPT to list today’s “top 10 digital trends”, here’s what it returned:
Increased usage of social media and messaging apps
Growth of online shopping and e-commerce
Streaming of video and music content
Online gaming and esports
Remote work and virtual collaboration tools
Use of mobile devices for internet access
Increased adoption of voice assistants and smart home devices
Growing interest in personalisation and customisation
The use of live streaming and video conferencing
The trend towards digital minimalism and reducing screen time.
Based on what you’ve read so far in this article, you may notice that a few of these trends might need updating (e.g. number 7).
However, I have few complaints with this list.
Indeed, looking back at our analysis from 2021 and 2022, many of those trends seem eerily familiar…
But on that note, it’s important to remember that AI tools still depend on accurate inputs and source material to deliver accurate and representative outputs.
So, with the seemingly endless barrage of misinformation and click-bait relating to digital trends, we’d advocate sense-checking any content that you “generate” using these AI tools against data and insights from other, trusted sources.
The outlook for online search in 2023
As I stated at the start of this article, many of the changes we’ve seen in the world’s search behaviours over the past twelve months haven’t been quite what we expected.
Moreover, with YouTube purportedly still the world’s second-largest “search engine”, and with companies including Meta, ByteDance, and Twitter all promoting their own forms of search ads, it’s likely that competition in the search arena will only intensify during 2023.
As a result, be sure to check back for our quarterly Global Digital Statshot Reports to learn what the world’s internet users are really doing when it comes to finding and discovering things online in 2023 and beyond.
Disclosure: Simon Kemp is a brand ambassador for GWI.
Click here to see all of Simon’s articles, read his bio, and connect with him on social media.