How much do you pay for research on your customers every year? Not just in terms of the in-depth panels, focus groups and customer surveys, but dues to organizations or one-off purchases of reports on industry trends and shopper behavior?
Knowing your customer is critical to reaching them effectively, and in creating the ideal environment in which to convert them to buyers. It's critical to making the right choices about advertising, site design, pricing, and future moves. And because it's that valuable and difficult to mine, that knowledge isn't cheap.
Whether you're using internal time and resources to dig through your own data or run tests, or ponying up for consultants or syndicated information, it can be difficult to make a business case to learn more about your audience. You have to make the most of free or inexpensive opportunities, whether your research budget is in the millions or the single digits.
Fortunately, your search efforts provide a great platform for learning about your customers through raw, publically available data, and inexpensive testing opportunities. And while focus groups, panels, and external reports can offer up gobs of very specific information, for the simplest and quickest of insights your search program and experts can provide a great supplement or outright resource for your business as a whole.
Keyword and Messaging Research
Want free access to general information about figures and trends on how people search, which can be leveraged for anything from ad copy to product naming, descriptions, or even new product selection? Effective use of Google's AdWords keyword tool can offer you insights into terms people use to describe the products you sell -- and thus the words that have clearly made a connection with them.
Do you sell "footwear" or "shoes"? Are they "grey" or "gray"? These can seem like small distinctions, but they all have traffic and audience implications that should be considered across your brand.
These can make a difference not just in your search campaigns (like your meta descriptions), but can help you determine the ways that they can be described in other copy. A broader view of how people are shopping for your products may also give you insights into other products that you should be offering: A seller of mainly black office chairs might find that, with the volume of searches (i.e. demand) for "white office chairs" versus "black office chairs," it'd be worthwhile to look at adding white to its product selection.
Further tools like Google Insights and Google Trends for Websites offer deeper insights on seasonal trending and geographic niceties.
Message Testing
Search ads are a great platform for testing marketing messaging across channels. By testing differences in CTR (and, ideally, conversion) across multiple messages, you can get relatively cheap feedback on major factors and unique selling points.
Testing these messages (on your branded terms for lowest costs) can quickly get feedback based on thousands of impressions, giving you a chance to see if people are more likely to be driven to your site or products based on subtle language changes like the earlier examples, or for broader points like customer service, wide selection, or price point.
Page and Site Design Testing
Similarly, by sending audience segments to different landing pages on the same ads, you can get a quick gauge of how a broader set of customers might react to a site-wide change by comparing interaction rates.
Did template A get more sales than template B? Were shoppers more likely to sign up for e-mail alerts with a new layout? Are they spending more time on the site with a slightly different layout?
This can be accomplished directly through AdWords by varying landing pages or by setting up a page-testing environment at the site, like Omniture Test & Target, Google Web Optimizer, or through a conversion optimization agency or consultant.
Infinite Possibilities
With free access to global search behavior, a pool of test subjects, and a platform to vary elements that's easy to use, large and small organizations alike can leverage search data and ads for customer insights. Whether it's supplementing other investments into customer research or making the most of slim(mer) budgets, small and large businesses alike should look to search's capabilities to shed some light on their customers' behavior, wants, and needs.
By Herndon Hasty
Showing posts with label Web Search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web Search. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
What's the Future of Search?
“Good news is, there is one. Bad news is, Robot Overlords”
Isn’t there something just inherently ‘Internet-y’ in speculating about what the future will bring? Personally, I always enjoy chatting with smart web-savvy internet folks about where we are headed with ‘this’ or ‘that’ in the future.At SMX Advanced in Seattle this year I asked Rebecca Lieb about what she is reading in the tea leaves insofar as search is concerned. Here are a few key concepts I considered the big takeaways from the discussion.
Social Media:
Rebecca believes we are going to see search engines spend a lot of time and effort developing ways to integrate social and behavioral data into search. We all know about Google’s appetite for data. Most people even on the periphery of the industry have a really good idea (and a nagging worry?) about how much data Google has about our search behavior.
What about Facebook? What about Twitter? Facebook goes a little different direction than what your behavior is, they know more than what we do... they know what we like. They know this because we tell them. We tell them our favorite colors, our favorite bands and where we like to go on vacation.
We tell Twitter about ourselves too, but most importantly with Twitter, we tell them what we are doing ‘right now’. Think a search engine wouldn’t be interested in knowing what you are doing ‘right now’ when you are doing a search? Maybe?
If you can get past the slightly creepy aspects of this concept, the upside of it all is that we will probably have better search engines. All of this data we are feeding the machines about ourselves is going to make the machines exponentially better at interpreting what we ‘mean’ when we type in a query. Pretty soon, who knows? They may know more about what we want than we do. Won’t that be nice? Instead of typing queries into search bars, we can just request optimal instructions.
There’s an App for That:
Rebecca seems to be of the opinion that search, particularly mobile search, might slip through the fingers of the giant aggregators like Google and Bing. She believes we are going to see an uptake in usage and mobile search marketshare going to specialized search apps like Urban Spoon.
There may still be 3 or 4 of you out there thinking ‘meh, mobile search’ but pay attention to the part in the video where Rebecca points out that “30% of Google search in Japan is coming from mobile search”. That’s a lot of search. Think that % is going to go down? Clearly I can’t speak for everybody, but personally, I think this smartphone thing might have some legs to it.
Say Hello to your Customer:
Another memorable Rebecca quote (well praraphrase at least) from the video is; “people are really realizing that monitoring reputation management is more and more a part of search”.
As social media data makes it’s way into search engines, companies better have a good idea about the potential impact - good and bad - they may be looking at when ALL of their customers have the potential to air their opinions.
The guy that bought the ‘XL Blue Beach Widget’ last week and left a 3 page rant about how bad it sucked and how horrible your company was to deal with, could more and more find his way to the top of search results for your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’. What happens if your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’ normally make up 30% of your seasonal spring internet sales? That could get ugly. Say hello to your customer. If they wave, wave back.
Search, as Rebecca points out is becoming more and more of a 2 way street. Your clients are informing your market strategies already now more than they ever have. This influence is only going to grow. If you are thinking about your Search strategy and have another group in your organization working on your Social strategy.... you guys need to hang out more. A lot more. Go to lunch, have drinks after work, become room mates (if you are management, consider handcuffing these people together) - whatever it takes. Social and search get a little closer every day. If search is vital to your business, then social is vital to your business, you may just not know it yet... But it’s coming.
by Mike Mcdonald
Watch the Future of Search Video with Rebecca Lieb
Isn’t there something just inherently ‘Internet-y’ in speculating about what the future will bring? Personally, I always enjoy chatting with smart web-savvy internet folks about where we are headed with ‘this’ or ‘that’ in the future.At SMX Advanced in Seattle this year I asked Rebecca Lieb about what she is reading in the tea leaves insofar as search is concerned. Here are a few key concepts I considered the big takeaways from the discussion.
Social Media:
Rebecca believes we are going to see search engines spend a lot of time and effort developing ways to integrate social and behavioral data into search. We all know about Google’s appetite for data. Most people even on the periphery of the industry have a really good idea (and a nagging worry?) about how much data Google has about our search behavior.
What about Facebook? What about Twitter? Facebook goes a little different direction than what your behavior is, they know more than what we do... they know what we like. They know this because we tell them. We tell them our favorite colors, our favorite bands and where we like to go on vacation.
We tell Twitter about ourselves too, but most importantly with Twitter, we tell them what we are doing ‘right now’. Think a search engine wouldn’t be interested in knowing what you are doing ‘right now’ when you are doing a search? Maybe?
If you can get past the slightly creepy aspects of this concept, the upside of it all is that we will probably have better search engines. All of this data we are feeding the machines about ourselves is going to make the machines exponentially better at interpreting what we ‘mean’ when we type in a query. Pretty soon, who knows? They may know more about what we want than we do. Won’t that be nice? Instead of typing queries into search bars, we can just request optimal instructions.
There’s an App for That:
Rebecca seems to be of the opinion that search, particularly mobile search, might slip through the fingers of the giant aggregators like Google and Bing. She believes we are going to see an uptake in usage and mobile search marketshare going to specialized search apps like Urban Spoon.
There may still be 3 or 4 of you out there thinking ‘meh, mobile search’ but pay attention to the part in the video where Rebecca points out that “30% of Google search in Japan is coming from mobile search”. That’s a lot of search. Think that % is going to go down? Clearly I can’t speak for everybody, but personally, I think this smartphone thing might have some legs to it.
Say Hello to your Customer:
Another memorable Rebecca quote (well praraphrase at least) from the video is; “people are really realizing that monitoring reputation management is more and more a part of search”.
As social media data makes it’s way into search engines, companies better have a good idea about the potential impact - good and bad - they may be looking at when ALL of their customers have the potential to air their opinions.
The guy that bought the ‘XL Blue Beach Widget’ last week and left a 3 page rant about how bad it sucked and how horrible your company was to deal with, could more and more find his way to the top of search results for your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’. What happens if your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’ normally make up 30% of your seasonal spring internet sales? That could get ugly. Say hello to your customer. If they wave, wave back.
Search, as Rebecca points out is becoming more and more of a 2 way street. Your clients are informing your market strategies already now more than they ever have. This influence is only going to grow. If you are thinking about your Search strategy and have another group in your organization working on your Social strategy.... you guys need to hang out more. A lot more. Go to lunch, have drinks after work, become room mates (if you are management, consider handcuffing these people together) - whatever it takes. Social and search get a little closer every day. If search is vital to your business, then social is vital to your business, you may just not know it yet... But it’s coming.
by Mike Mcdonald
Watch the Future of Search Video with Rebecca Lieb
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