14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re expecting a child or already have one (or more), you’re more likely to make Google searches, the company says.
According to a new survey conducted by Google’s Think Insights, new and expecting parents perform 2.7 more online searches than users who are not parents. Most of the completed searches, more specifically 56 percent, are related to maternity topics and they’re done on a mobile device.
During the first three months of the year, mobile searches about baby development have shot up 72 percent, while those for topics related to babies and parenting have climbed to 25 percent.
Parents were also interested in clothes for kids, but not in the way you think. More specifically, they’re trying to find out how to clean baby clothes and how to make them reusable, most likely for hand-me-downs. Other popular topics searched for by new parents are related to health issues, safety, education and clothes.
Since this is Google we’re talking about, YouTube’s stats are also available. It looks like viewership of parenting videos has also grown with 329 percent in 2014.
The rise makes sense, Google argues, since most of the new parents are aged 18 to 34, which is basically a generation that is quite likely to use smartphones to search for quick information.
“They’re more likely to belong to the younger millennial generation that has grown up with phones in hand. Indeed, our survey showed that youth plus parenthood is a digital double whammy: Young parents (ages 18–34) search 54% more than older parents. Young mothers use smartphones as their primary device most often (more than fathers and older moms). But millennial dads actually did the most searches overall, so don’t discount them as consumers,” Google notes.
This segment of users is quite important for advertisers. Actually, quite recently, Princeton Sociology Professor Janet Vertesi explained her difficult journey of hiding her pregnancy from the Internet, which included avoiding social media, not making credit card purchases, using her personal email or even doing searches related even remotely to the topic.
Why? Well, she says that while the average marketing data for a person is worth 10 cents, a pregnant woman’s data costs $1.50. That means that once a woman becomes pregnant and online advertisers figure it out, they won’t stop promoting products.
Furthermore, they’ll do so even more aggressively than usual, which is not something that anyone wants.