Image from: All Things D
Since Intel dubbed a new class of personal computers, called ‘Ultrabooks’, last year, many computer manufacturers have now entered the market to offer their own ultra-thin, notebooks designed for performance. Intel has claimed Ultrabooks will make up 40% of the market by the end of this year and Dell has been one of the most recent manufacturers to enter with its XPS 13 Ultrabook launch. The Acer Aspire, Apple Air, Asus Zenbook, and Lenovo IdeaPad are some of the founding members of the club. Larger and more diverse manufacturers, like HP, LG, Samsung, and Toshiba have joined too. Dell’s entry prompted me to take a quick look at how the manufacturers that predominantly focus on personal computers are faring with respect to search in this emerging market. Interestingly, each manufacturer stood out for different reasons.
I focused on the peak holiday shopping season. Both Asus and Dell attracted growing percentages of visits through paid and organic search with Asus leading the charge. Dell wasn’t far behind even during its pre-Ultrabook launch and perhaps it will attract even more consumers through search after its Ultrabook launches.
I then wondered how specifically paid search was contributing to the manufacturers’ search activity and was surprised by the results! 17% of Lenovo’s search referrals came from paid clicks from November 2011 through January 2012. It doesn’t seem like Lenovo’s paid search worked as well to drive overall search referrals, as compared to Asus and Dell’s single digit paid search percents that still drove higher overall search referral percents.
Wow! Acer still wasn’t standing out…until I looked at ‘ultrabook’ keyword search referrals. I looked at the top domains attracting traffic through the ‘ultrabook’ keyword and finally saw Acer speak out in the club. Acer was the top manufacturer website attracting nearly 12% of all ‘ultrabook’ search referrals throughout the holiday shopping season. Now that’s some targeted marketing! It looks like consumer and professional review websites played a significant role too and attracted more than half of the search referrals.
Dell was the second manufacturer to make the list and most of this period includes time before Dell’s Ultrabook was even announced. It is interesting to note that the larger and more diverse manufacturers, like HP, LG, Samsung, and Toshiba didn’t appear on this top list. It may only be a matter of time before Dell or another manufacturer supplants Acer as the new president of the Ultrabook club.
