80% of Adults Purchase Online

November 14, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik

MarketingCharts.com today reports on a Nielsen rating study which shows that nearly 80% of adults make purchases online. 80%! That is a VERY significant number. How can you not be establishing your business with this high percentage?

According to this study, “The #1 online transaction category was travel, with 38% of adult online consumers making at least one travel purchase on the web in the previous six months. Credit-card account management and home banking took the #2 and #3 spots, with 36% and 35% of consumers conducting transactions, respectively.

Clothes, shoes, accessories and books were also popular online purchases.”


**About the research: The online purchase research is based on a quarterly survey of approximately 36,000 US internet users age 18+.**

As travel being the highest purchase of adults online, you can imagine the CPC prices in Google. According to the keyword tool (which is always an estimate), here are some keywords and their estimated CPC:

bargain airline tickets $2.30
cheap one way airline tickets $4.49
cheap airline tickets com $3.42
airline tickets for cheap $1.99
cheap airfare tickets $2.23

So, with those prices (and there are thousands of keywords for this “niche”) and you can build an incredible campaign targetting every city, state, country, etc (I’d probably kill it…I just got an idea) So if you’re thinking about becoming an affiliate and doing any PPC promotion, take that into consideration as you’re probably competing around 23 advertisers in Travel!