“A Couple of Chicks” surveyed a group of teens on their preferred search engine, travel site, and way to communicate online; a couple of brands clearly emerged as succeeding in reaching Generation Y.
The Kids Are Alright With Google
They’re young, they have disposable income, and in a few years will have likely have jobs and more money to spend. They spend a lot of time online, and when A Couple of Chicks Marketing invited 125 high schoolers to take part in a survey, some significant preferences emerged.
When it comes to search, it’s Google Google Google by a huge margin. 85 percent favored Google over Yahoo, a distant second with 10 percent. And although the report said those percentages virtually reversed when it came to a preferred home page, the Yahoo home page fans still went to Google for search.
More than half of them, 53 percent, don’t mind going a few pages deep into the search result pages to find their information. For you marketers out there aiming at Gen Y, 79 percent of this survey said they’d never clicked on a sponsored ad. Nearly half of them, 46 percent, believe that most of the SERPs were ads regardless of their being organic or paid.
IM gets a big nod over email. 93 percent of the group use IM at least sometimes if not always. Email gets a cursory check, then it’s off to IM friends. Hotmail was the top choice for these teens for email.
The report noted Expedia has done the best job building its brand with Gen Y. 56 percent of the teens said their families booked vacations on Expedia, with another 28 percent using Hotels.com. Expedia has Hotels.com under its corporate umbrella, so Expedia is getting 84 percent of the group’s travel business.
Quite a few PR folks for the competition and the hotel chains may want to spend the holidays figuring out how to reach Gen Y, based on this passage from the report: “From a marketing perspective, teens were not at all familiar with Travelocity, Priceline, Hotwire or even the ability to book travel on Brand sites. In fact over 73% recorded they did not have a favorite hotel brand.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
