"While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to." ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes)

With that being said, lets take a look at what these "average Joes" are doing to find the latest and greatest web sites on the Internet.

Common methods used by Internet users to find websites:

• Online Banner ads - 1%
• Targeted email - 1.2%
• Television Advertising - 1.4%
• By Accident - 2.1%
• Magazine/Newspaper Advertising - 4.4%
• Word-of-mouth - 20%
• Random Internet Browsing - 20%
• Their favorite Search engine - 46%

Search engines alone account for almost half of all web site traffic. Now lets narrow down the activities of our "group of average Joes"...

Organic (non Pay-Per-Click) search results return 250% more clicks than Pay-Per-Click search results. This is mostly due to the dying trend in interruptive and obtrusive marketing methods. The majority of consumers can usually tell what is not and what is a Sponsored Ad and many purposely avoid the latter with a passion.

Organic search leads to 30% more conversions (sales) than paid search. This again is due to the fact that people are searching for specific information. They don't want to be interrupted by intrusive and annoying ads. They want to be educated and the organic search results are more likely to educate them than blatantly attempt to sell them. This results in more conversions.

The first page of search results (the first 10 results or so) receives more than 80% of clicks for the entire query.

Now here's another interesting fact. Only 68% of users will click on a result on the 1st page of results. The other 32% will browse to the 2nd page of results and beyond (from the 11th to the 20th result, etc...). The 2nd page of results gets approximately 10% of the total clicks of the millions of results returned by the search engine. Hardly any people look further than the 1st two of pages of results. You must also note that most people will click on more than one result on the 1st page. This is how you get 90% for the 1st two pages of results; multiple clicks. Only 8% of search engine users will review more than three pages of results before clicking on a result.

So if you are one of those people that thinks that traditional methods of advertising are the way to go, you might want to go ask 20 "average Joes" how they find a company’s web site. Only 1 is going to say some form of traditional medium. Most will say they "Googled" it.