June 1, 2012
On Thursday, May 24th, I had the opportunity to attend Google’s Think Performance daylong event. As a digital enthusiast who has spent most of my career working on performance focused campaigns, I was especially looking forward to this event which was focused on one of the aspects of my job that I’m most passionate about: delivering quantifiable results for my clients.
While I found the day to be valuable overall, Avinash Kaushik’s talk resonated with me the most. Avinash presented the crowd with a Venn diagram showing the intersection we as marketers should all strive to attain – the sweet spot is the intersection of influence, experience and value to the consumer or – marketing, magic and money for marketers.
It’s Intent Marketing – Not Internet Marketing
Nowhere is this more true than in search engine marketing. Examining your search campaign is like examining a database of intent. With that, we must understand what people want, what context they’re in and ultimately deliver what they want – and this is how we get closer to our own goals. There’s no better place to take a closer look at what people want and their intents than looking at your search query report. Search query reports allow us to see the exact keyword that a user typed in to get to our ad. What does your consumer want? Well for one they may be looking for the new product and feature that’s available in the US but not in Canada. They’re recalling the song in your ad and searching it. They’re looking for amazing gluten free recipes . And it goes on. Point being, we have our databases of intent at our finger tips, we just need to use them – and paid search is a great way to extract those insights.
We Are Measuring the Wrong Stats
While it’s fantastic to deliver hundreds of thousands of clicks to a site, what Avinash emphasized was that marketers, by and large aren’t measuring what people are doing on the site. Emphasis should be focused on metrics such as bounce rate – how many people leave your site as soon as they get to it? How many people land on your site and think this isn’t worth checking out further? As a paid search marketer, I love looking at bounce rates because it the strategy we are implementing – matching keywords to intent.
Most of the time, paid search visitors exhibit a lower bounce rate, view more pages and spend more time on site. So remember, while it’s great to drive tons of traffic to your website, make sure that you’re driving quality traffic.
I will caveat this by saying, if you are linking users deep enough on your site and accurately – you may experience a higher bounce rate if little engagement is required from the visitor. Your site may be the kind of site that people visit, look at, get what they wanted and leave, so measuring bounce rate isn’t for everyone.
(For more information on when bounce rate isn’t bad, please read this post by Nick Stamoulis on Biznology.com.)
You Must Deliver Joy
Measuring bounce rate is a key way of seeing if you are indeed delivering joy. Remember feel it or forget it? IF the consumer isn’t feeling it – they will forget it, and you won’t be delivering joy. Marketers need to focus on the Experience portion of their websites, your advertising campaign may be delightful but when consumers actively go looking for you – whether that be on search or directly to your brand’s site – they better be delighted, and most of them aren’t. The average e-commerce site has an 80% abandonment rate. Meaning that 80% of people who get to the check out page, people who literally have their wallet in hand, wanting to give you their money, leave due to some malfunction or annoying site feature.
So always remember to focus on the user’s intent – not necessarily your own – to deliver joy to your customers and measure the right stats for your goals.