I know it's true of the Architects I deal or have dealt with… all of a sudden, they all want to have a magazine …. because they know many times, people find out about a business or service by multiple channel, and often, it's an offline channel.

I bet anything that eplans.com gets the bigger chunk of it's traffic and sales from tons of home plan magazines it publishes.  I bet anything that HGTV gets a lot of traffic from both the Cable network and magazines and videos they put out.

Now studies back up the relationship between offline advertisng and online search behavior according to Jordan McCollum at MarketingPilgrim.

"…MediaPost’s Center for Media Research reports that offline advertising often prompts online searches. In fact, of any action taken, the study performed by BIGresearch and the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association finds that an online search is the most popular consumer response to an engaging advertisement.

Just under half of the consumers surveyed said they’d begun an online search after viewing ads in magazines, reading articles, seeing ads on TV and seeing ads on newspapers (in order of popularity)."

The other thing I've noticed - most leads are based on branded keywords - I don't think that's in the report but it's undeniably true, at least in every architect I've dealt with so far, that most search activity is on the name of the architect.