Up until now, Adwords conversions have always been attributed to the last click on one of your ads. While this is great for campaign optimization on a basic level, allowing you to trim off non-performing ads and ad groups, there has been no data on the Customer Journey before that click.
Google sees me go to the shops?
No, this isn’t the bit where you get in your car and drive to the supermarket. The Customer Journey is the decision making process that people go through when making a purchase or beginning a relationship with a company. It is comprised of 4 stages:
- Research
- Consideration
- Purchase (or lead generation)
- Loyalty
A potential customer may conduct a variety of searches while they go about their journey. For instance, lets imagine they need a new laptop. Now, this being a reasonably significant purchase they are going to want to get the best possible machine they can, so they do their research. The searches usually comprise of 1-2 keywords, which might look something like this:
Laptops, Best Laptops, Business Laptops, Laptop Review
Once they have a broad understanding of what the market offers, they will move into the consideration phase, using more specific queries in relation to their needs:
Laptop battery life, Windows 7 Laptops, Gaming Laptop Review
Note that these are longer queries, usually comprising of 2-3 keyword combinations. In the purchase phase the searches can be even longer, usually containing buying signal keywords:
Buy Gaming Laptops, Cheap Gaming Laptops, Buy Laptops Online UK
The Loyalty stage is all about brand, and will be driven by customers’ experiences, word of mouth and so forth. Keywords will look like this:
Dell Laptops, Buy Compaq Laptops, Alienware Online Shop
Thanks to Google, you can now start to track this process, and actually determine the value of ads that contribute to the decision/conversion process, but aren’t the last clicked ad. Google calls this:
Search Funnels
Search Funnels at the moment features 7 reports. These include reports on on ads that were clicked on before the conversion, as well as impressions of ads during his process, (assisted clicks and impressions), time lag, and first and last click analysis.
The potential of these reports is great, as they will allow a huge amount of insight into how your customers go about deciding to buy from you. This data can then drive keyword bids and ads that can potentially strengthen the whole advertising process through Adwords, as well as feeding into other areas of your marketing effort.
Now the bad news; Search Funnels are still in beta, but Google does say on their blog that they will be available “in the next few weeks,” so for the moment you will have to content yourself with the preview video:
[vsw id="Wwj5W0UzAlo" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]
