Search is seen as a crucial part of the consumer journey. Search helps users explore, compare, and achieve their final goals. Now, with the power of mobile in everyone’s hand, search has evolved to become a digital assistant helping users find the right information in any format they want.
This evolution of search demands a revamp in how search engine marketing has been historically done. Years back it was about just finding the right keyword portfolio and maximizing the Return On Investment (ROI) by optimizing bids on the keywords. Later, search engine marketing platforms were able to provide more insights into the search behavior that the keyword portfolio started, thus representing the purchase journey of the consumer. Cut to the present, marketers are now empowered with so much consumer insights and data that they’re feeling overwhelmed. On the other hand, search marketing hasn’t improved significantly from the previous mode. Here’s an example of where the gap is:
← (Paid search 10 years back)
(Later it evolved) →
Now it is →
The new approach required a complete embrace of consumer insights. A search marketing account manager will have to uncover underlying insights about consumer behavior and use them smartly in their campaigns. Let me illustrate this with a case:
Using LXRInsights, our proprietary data insights tool, we analyzed Mother’s Day 2016 to uncover consumer insights. Below, I’ll demonstrate how three of these insights can be translated into paid search tactics.
1. Women spent more than men by 18% on Mother’s Day gifts.
Insight: This clearly shows that there are more female shoppers out there looking for Mother’s Day gifts.
Tactic: A PPC manager should ideally translate this insight into a tactic of creating an audience of past visitors and segmenting them by gender. A female audience should be added to the paid search and display campaigns with a higher bid percentage. This immediately helps in driving a better ROI.
2. Almost 1/3rd of the sales happened in the last week before Mother’s Day:
Insight: The number of sales really peaked as we got closer to Mother’s Day. Last minute deals were stronger compared to those of other events. However, this was expected because Mother’s Day is the third largest holiday for online shopping.
Tactic: In this case, we should allocate 1/3 of the budget for the last week. The ads should be composed with countdown timers instilling a sense of hurriedness for users.
3. 40% of the converting users used paid search as their last click channel:
Insight: This means the advertiser has spent quite a lot on paid search. From a deeper analysis, we found out that almost 20% of the paid search users originated from emails. These users came to the website, explored, and then bounced back. They later searched for the site, clicked on the ad to visit the site, and made a purchase.
Tactic: We can ideally exclude email users from our paid search campaigns by creating an audience in Google Analytics for visitors from email. This will let them click on the organic listing for which there is no cost involved.
Every consumer insight can be translated into a tactic. During these times of commoditization of search marketing, “using consumer insights” is the way forward for paid search marketers. It helps differentiate marketers and helps advertisers run the most effective campaigns.
