CheezeDMG Blog

Paid search has often been seen as a purely direct response advertising mechanism but recent work has proven how search can and should be used for brand building.

Google’s move to open up the bidding arena has meant there has never been a more important time to look at all avenues where your company’s product can be seen.  Suddenly search listings on your brand name alone can become a very crowded place and the CPC can quite drastically increase, even with a good quality score.

It is therefore imperative, and sometimes more cost effective, that you are visible at all aspects of a customer’s purchase cycle – from research to purchase. This is also where you should consider the role of the keyword groups you are bidding on and also the creative message which is shown. For example, generic keywords will mainly be used by a customer in the research stage of the purchase cycle and, depending on the type of product they are researching they will not be ready to purchase at this stage.

Bidding on generic terms will therefore have three important roles to play. Firstly, ensuring that your brand is visible when the customer searches at this important first stage of their intended purchase requirement. Secondly, providing a sales message which extols the virtues of your product over your competitor and encourages the customer to click through to find out more. And thirdly, to ensure that when the customer is ready to buy, your brand is the first one they think of.

As the customer moves through the purchase cycle the keywords they are searching on will generally become more niche and your creative should reflect this with the view that the customer has made up their mind that they are going to buy the product and now needs the incentive to choose your product over a competitor’s.

The diagram below shows the purchase life cycle and the way search can be used to great effect at all stages of the cycle.

All of this sounds great in context but it is often viewed in a purely direct marketing point of view and if the generic keywords are not converting to bookings they will often have their bids reduced or will be dropped from the campaign altogether.

At Cheeze, we track campaigns through an exposure to conversion reporting tool which enables us to place a value on all of the keywords which play a part in the final purchase and not just the final keyword which is clicked on. In other words, last click isn’t the only winner.

With this tracking we are able to measure all aspects of the online campaign which have had a part to play in the customer’s purchase cycle, offering a greater understanding of campaign cause and effect, and most importantly cost and return. The initial results are already showing the high percentage of customer’s who start a search on a generic term but end with a conversion from a search on a brand term.

If we were to look at this in a traditional reporting environment then an advertiser may well ask why we are bothering to bid on the expensive generic terms when the conversions are coming through the brand terms.

Exposure2Conversion tracking is showing the importance all aspects of a campaign have to play and the need to interact with the customer at each step of their purchase cycle. It also enables the success of all aspects of a campaign to be fully established, whether it is a display campaign, search campaign, email campaign and so on.

By tracking all elements, their importance and value can be formulated and decisions can be made as to the right message and right platform which should be used to target specific stages of the purchase cycle.

With search this is especially important, with certain keyword groups being given certain values and decisions made on how far the bids can be pushed with no immediate return on investment.

From this, the type of bid optimisation will suddenly change from bidding on just one keyword or phrase, to bidding on clusters of keywords / phrases which collectively will result in a booking.

Suddenly search marketing is no longer seen as two dimensional single keyword to single bid campaign. Instead it can be viewed as multi-dimensional, multi-purpose a campaign which not only result in the final sale, but also supports the brand education of the customer.

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Wow, that was a long post! It needed to be a long one, because the subject is important. This new exposure2conversion tracking helps us to understand and track the wider consumer behaviour in relation to our paid advertising. This tracking can also be used across multiple channels so we can identify the performance of display and search campaigns to identify the overall performance with regards to our campaigns.

If you wish to learn more about how we can help you, please check the website or call Tom Griffiths on 01473 236892.