Graham Everitt, Search Consultant at Reform, discusses how search can be used as a tool for understanding consumer behaviour.
The internet is peppered with articles delivering the “top tips for success in paid search”, forums containing in depth discussions of how SEOs have uncovered new ways to get sites ranking high, and case studies of how new search technologies have improved search performance by X percent. This is all highly valuable information for keeping pace with an ever changing market and squeezing more value out of a pre-existing campaign, but there seems to be a lack of thought around the topic of using search as a tool to understand how your consumers are behaving, and how businesses should adapt their behavior accordingly.
Find out what the consumer is doing
Advertisers frequently become immersed in the minutia of their search advertising; worrying about getting the balance right between paid and natural to maximize ROI, building long lists of keywords to target “the long tail”, or finding the sweet spot between the volume and cost per acquisition play-off that maximizes profit.
Search data can tell us a whole lot more though. The consumer doesn’t think of search as an acquisition channel though – it is a tool for research, navigation, and other means. The success of search as an acquisition channel means that it’s always going to be predominantly thought of in this respect by advertisers, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t use it for other purposes too.
How to do it
The availability of data from search engines is getting better and better.
Microsoft Advertising’s Ad Intelligence tool is a free excel plug-in that gives you data on exact search volumes for different searches, demographic data on who is performing these searches, and advertising related data. The demographic data and accurate search volume data is a huge advance in terms of data transparency; we can tie up customer segmentation with different search terms. This allows us to feed search data into other channels, perhaps to inform the phrasing used in above the line advertising, or to direct website optimisation to create a better response from certain demographics, or figure out which demographic we should email with a certain offer on a certain product.
Google has recently introduced “funnel reporting”, that allows users of the Google Conversion Tracking tool to see the journey from start to conversion through paid search interactions; looking at all the keywords that were involved rather than just the last click. This tells us a whole lot more than we’ve been able to see before, and can inform content development and the broader strategy to allow us to understand the needs of consumers at the outset of the decision making process that eventually leads to a transaction.
Tools such as AdIntel are allowing us to track what’s actually going on on the results pages, getting a better idea of what messaging and offers our competitors are using. This gives us valuable, reliable, data led insight into what is going on in the marketplace and allows us to respond to changes in competitor strategy. We can also see which pages are ranking highest on the natural listings. This allows us to see what content Google is prioritising in the natural listings, which is driven by their understanding of what kind of content searchers are looking for. This can feed into content development strategy, which will improve not only search performance but usability.
So what?
Data has long been considered the key driver of marketing insight. Just using these three tools can take data out of the search silo and allow us to understand how different demographics behave, the thought processes that consumers go through when going through the buying process, keep an eye on competitor behavior, and improve the relevance of website content. Using search as a barometer for consumer behavior, as an insight tool, can help us develop a more thorough understanding of how our consumers are behaving and cater for their needs more effectively – which is what marketing is all about.
