We discovered the following interesting bit of research today in a BBC news article quoting Dr Jakob Nielson:

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

“Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.But, he added, this did not mean that the search engines were doing a perfect job.
“When you watch people search we often find that people fail and do not get the results they were looking for,” he said.
“In the long run anyone who wants to beat Google just has to make a better search,” said Dr Nielsen.

The online environment does not stand still, nor do the industries in which our clients operate. It is no longer feasible to build a website presence and sit on laurels.

Clickthinking’s strategy team recently compiled and presented a comprehensive website review for a long-standing client. This process draws on the intangible of years of development experience, together with the hard metrics provided by Omniture’s Site Catalyst, an analytics tool adopted by many of the Fortune 500 companies. This assessment is both microscopic and visionary. We drill down to page architecture and usability, considering visitor paths and click density. We analyse finding methods, search terms, and lead generation. All this to better tailor the website offering to the expectations of the consumer.

This process is collaborative in nature, drawing on Client knowledge to be best of breed. Our findings become recommendations and are transformed into wire frames. Development is briefed into our Design studio and technical department.
Once again our analytics tracking shall be the building block for our change review, which shall be conducted quarterly, with further improvement and modification to follow.

Our Marketing Team at Clickthinking recently returned from a two day strategy session in Johannesburg. We had very fruitful meetings with valued clients, Rani Resorts and CCAfrica. The purpose of our trip was to review achievements to date and look ahead to our milestones. We have put in place stringent reporting, and cemented our combined dedication to a profitable relationship. We look forward to the remainder of 2007 and beyond.

I am currently sitting at a conference in Miami where speakers from AOL, Msn, Yahoo!, Hyatt, Delta, Orbitz e.t.c are talking about a range of topics including online marketing, crm, measuring ROI e.t.c. More to follow but its good to compare our strategies for our travel clients with case studies presented as well as chat to people about their views on the next 12 - 18 months.

For the full agenda, click here.

According to Nielsens, Google and Yahoo! have both extended their reach in 2006 and currently dominate online search sharing 75% of the market. As the figures above indicate, Microsoft have lost ground and have shown a 12% decline and could potentially lose their position to AOL search.

One has to question their strategy and direction considering the investment in time and energy that they have ploughed into the search category.