Adwords Management, Targeting

Adwords: Enhanced Targeting Functionality

April 19, 2010 in Google, Online Advertising by Robb

Unlike traditional advertising with TV, radio, or print, Adwords tells you exactly how many people were shown your ads, how many responded with a click, and how many actually converted by buying your product, downloading your sample, etc.

There’s more to the story…  Now, Adwords lets you in on some things that have been undisclosed up until now. Let’s imagine that you sell sporting goods online, and take a peek at a couple of your customers.

Search Funnels

There’s your future customer, searching for that excellent new racket you sell. He sees your ad, but doesn’t click. He’s looking at the organic results first. He goes off to grab a snack and then comes back and searches again. This time he clicks on your ad. Then he goes back to Google. He searches for another racket, one that’s a little less pricey. He sees your ad this time, too, and looks at a couple of your competitors’ sites. He changes his search query again, sees your ad, clicks through… but doesn’t buy. The next weekend, having talked with his friends about their experiences, he searches again for the racket. Once again, he sees your ad, clicks through – and this time, he takes the plunge and buys the racket.

Wouldn’t you like to know all that? After all, if you knew it could take a customer a week to make up his mind, you might keep a campaign going longer than if you thought your customers decided within one day. If you knew they had to see your ads five times before buying, you might budget differently. If you knew that seeing the less pricey alternative helped them make up their minds to buy the top of the line racket, you’d see the value of that ad differently.

The new Search Funnels feature tells you just about all of this (not the conversations with friends, of course, but most of the rest of it). Using this feature, you can learn more about your customers’ behavior. How quickly do your customers convert? How many times do they see your ad before they click?  How long do they wait between the first time they see your ad and when they finally convert?

To get this information, you simply sign in to your Adwords account and choose Reporting, and then Search Funnels. Search Funnels sorts all the times your customer looks at your ads into three groups:

• Assist impressions: these are the times when your ad is presented to your customer, and the eventual customer doesn’t click on it.
• Assist click: these are the times the customer clicks on the ad, but doesn’t convert.
• Last click before conversion: these are the times the customer clicks on the ad and does convert.

Now you can see how many impressions and clicks your ads require before they lead to conversions, and how long a time lag there is between one of these events and the next. You can compare campaigns and keywords, too.

Remarketing

There’s another customer.  She has visited your site before, window shopping through your sporting goods, and has bought a couple of small items, but she has never taken the plunge and made a major purchase. Still, you think she may be interested in the new top-of-the-line racket, so you use the Google Content Network to present some ads about that racquet to her as she visits other sites around the web. She’s not actively searching for a racket right now, so she hasn’t seen your keyword-driven ads, but when she sees your ad, she recognizes your store as one she’s shopped at before, she clicks through, and this time she decides to treat herself to a new racket.

This scenario sounds like you’d really have to know a lot of personal information about your customer, but actually Google has a clever plan for this.

You tag pages with a remarketing tag, such as “rackets.”  When someone visits that page, they’re added to your Rackets list. Later, as they visit sites using the Google content network, they’ll be recognized and shown your ads about racquets. They recognize you, since they’ve visited before, and you get the chance to keep in touch with them without having to capture more information.