Keeping Up With The Customer

[dropcap type=”3″]W[/dropcap]herever you are in the world, whatever your line of business, these are challenging times. Costs are rising fast, competition is increasing and the overall economic climate is more uncertain than for years. While no one is certain exactly how markets may react day to day, we do know one thing: consumers’ use of the web to hunt for value will accelerate.

Search has always been a cost-effective channel that removes the guesswork from marketing, but the industry has seen many improvements over the last few years and advertisers who are used to search marketing might benefit from improvements and optimisation of their accounts to start the New Year with a bang.

Know your industry

Whatever the size of your business and whichever industry it operates in, it helps to begin with a holistic perspective on the products and services you offer and how they fit into a broader industry landscape.

For example, one factor to consider is the scope of your product range – do you offer a wide variety of products or a very specific type of product? What makes your business different from others in your market? Businesses may also take into account elements like seasonality (holidays, fiscal years) or industry trends.

Google Insights for Search is a free tool that will show you what people are searching for within a particular sector, geography or across a particular time range. Marketers can use this new tool to understand what people are looking for (or not looking for) and adjust budgets accordingly.

Know your audience

Understanding your customer base and learning more about the audience you would like to reach in your advertising can often influence the way you structure an account, the keywords you choose to include, and especially the ad text variations you test. Targeting an upscale clientele focused on luxury items is very different from attracting bargain hunters.

Try to think beyond age and gender, though these may still factor into your strategy. Is your product or service something everyone uses on a daily basis or something only a small subset of people, such as chemical engineers, can understand or describe? For instance, you may want to sell the same product to both Internet-savvy teens and their more technology-shy parents, but may need to have different advertising strategies to reach the two different audiences. Also, users in different regions may respond differently to your products and services.

To really think like your customer, you may want to:

Use the Keyword Tool to help understand how potential customers could be searching for your product or service. A florist in Manchester might look up ‘Manchester flowers’ or ‘flower delivery’ to see what synonyms and keyword variations exist for these terms. You may discover the term you use to describe your service differs from the way your customers would describe it.
Familiarise yourself with the unique buying cycle of your industry by thinking about user searches, so you can adjust your keywords, ad text, or budget accordingly. For example, someone searching for ‘hybrid cars’ may not be as close to buying an automobile as someone searching for the specific make, model, and year of a vehicle.
Be open to the idea that your true audience may not be exactly who you think they are. Some video games, for instance, have a surprising number of female fans, often mothers who originally bought the games for their children.

Keeping an accurate profile of your target audience(s) in mind will help you choose the right keywords and ad text to reach that audience, and also help you filter out users who are unlikely to click through or convert for you.

[quote_box_right]Search has always been a cost-effective channel that removes the guesswork from marketing, but the industry has seen many improvements over the last few years and advertisers who are used to search marketing might benefit from improvements and optimisation of their accounts to start the New Year with a bang.[/quote_box_right]

Know your goals

Your goals are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when optimising an existing account. Are you more interested in branding your business, garnering clicks, or maximising your ROI? It is important to clearly identify and prioritise what specific goals you want to achieve and design your campaigns around those goals.

Depending on what your primary goal is, you may want to consider the following tips:

Maximising clicks: If your aim is to cast the widest net to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general, irrelevant keywords will negatively affect your click-through rate, Quality Score, minimum bids and positioning.
Optimising for Ad Performance: One component of improving ad performance is maximising your click-through rate. If this is your goal, the first step is to filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should ideally reflect a user’s search as closely as possible. If you are running on a keyword such as ‘London travel tours,’ your ad text should also highlight travel tours in London.
Maximising ROI: Maximising your return on investment calls for a little more understanding about the sales cycle unique to your product or service, and how keyword searches can reflect which stage a user might be in that cycle.
Restructure accounts – with AdWords, budgets can be spread over different ad groups, allowing businesses to focus spend on different products services – e.g. if shoes are selling better than hats, then move more budgets into the ad groups and creatives promoting shoes.

Test

Even a finely tuned account can typically be improved. You may have keywords that are no longer driving quality traffic, ad text that is getting stale, or landing pages on your website that aren’t converting.

As AdWords rewards ads that are relevant to particular keywords, testing different creatives is very important. Rather than using generic creatives to promote different products or services, ensure you test a different variety of keywords and let Google auto-optimise these to ensure you get the best results.

Also, Website Optimiser is a free tool that allows businesses to gain a scientific insight of what users think of the website. By testing different variations of the same page, businesses can understand exactly which parts of a site perform better than others. Perhaps one image is performing better than another, for examples, or the layout of the page is preventing people moving through to the next phase of the buying cycle. Website Optimiser can analyse things like:

Site structure or sitemap: Are your products and services organized in a way that makes sense from your visitor’s perspective? Specific landing pages can help these prospective customers find exactly what they are looking for.
Layout and design: Visitors to your site may respond more favourably to a site that is straightforward, clean, and simple to navigate than one that is flashy or slick. Those who do not find what they are looking for tend to leave the site within the first several seconds.
Ease of use: When visitors come to your site, they should be able to quickly understand how to navigate your site and find the information they’re looking for. Navigation and search bars allow your prospective customers to look for more specific items or different styles. Clearly marked buttons that read ‘Sign Up Now!’ or ‘Add to Cart’ encourage further action from these prospective customers.

If you’re not testing, you may be missing out on opportunities to increase your return on investment. As we say at Google, always remain in Beta (or testing mode).

Evaluate

As important as testing is, it’s also important to measure the impact of your experiments on performance. Any good analytics package will help you understand your traffic and how your customers use your site. The list of data points you can analyse is growing all the time. What’s important is acting on your findings, and basing decisions on hard data and numbers.

With all the uncertainty in the air, search marketing gives a refreshingly clear insight into what your customers are looking for and how they behave on the web. Understanding your whole business by testing, evaluating and iterating the search marketing strategy should be top of every marketer’s agenda.

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