Target For Success – The Buying Cycle

In PPC Management most people are optimising for conversion, they constantly monitor their keywords and drop those that don’t convert however some take too small a dataset into account and forget to factor in the buying cycle.

We all want to maximise conversions but most accounts are optimised for sales generation from immediate click to conversion, but in reality this is often a little like trying to get married before even dating, never mind proposing an engagement!

There are so many suppliers or sellers of every product or service that customers do research now, they may do multiple searches over a period of hours, days, weeks or even months depending on the product or service and their intent is different at every step of the way so there is opportunity to nurture searches even if they won’t convert immediately.

People are getting more web savvy and it’s even fed into the real world with “showrooming” (read more here) where people go shopping, try on clothes or ask for expert advice on products like TV’s or Audio equipment and then go online, often whilst still in the store and buy from an online retailer for cheaper. – Apps like “red laser” can be used very quickly to price check on items by just scanning the bar code!

In ppc management we must take the time to get to the bottom of our clients buying cycle so that we can fully assess what kind of people encounter our client’s site and current AdWords adverts and how they interact with the site, what they want from it and how it fills their needs at given moments in the buying cycle.

It’s wise to work out the buyer intent and where it fits in within the buying cycle and build Adgroups to focus on each stage, this has the added benefit of keeping research level/low intent keywords from muddying the water of higher intent agroups.

The buyer intent stages for a service or product, say an LCD TV,  may look like this :

Low intent – Initial Research stage of the buying cycle –
Keywords like : “how do I, how, what to do, how to, what is, why, who” etc.
Example : “What is the best LCD TV” or “Why LCD TV is best”

Medium Intent – Comparison stage of the buying cycle –
Keywords like : “Cheapest, best, closest, fastest,
Example : “Cheapest 42 inch LCD TV” or “Best rated 42 inch LCD TV”

High Intent – Buying Stage of the buying cycle –
Keywords like  : “buy, sale, offer, deal, delivery”
Example : “buy 42 inch LCD TV” or “LCD TV next day delivery”

Ideally we want all the high intent keywords as they convert quickly but if your competitors have a good campaign targeting the low and medium intent keywords earlier in the buying cycle then searchers may already have brand recognition with a competitor before they even get exposed to you at the high intent stage and whilst you may compete on price; trust counts more in many sectors so you could be missing valid opportunities if you are just targeting high intent keywords.

A strategy for the above example might be to design landing pages or even downloadable pdf’s (with an email capture field possible to then drip feed email market to) explaining why LCD TV’s are a better option and target the research keywords with a new campaign (so you can control the cost more easily) with low CPC’s.

For services the low intent keywords are often nuggets of gold if you have a lead capture form and build a relationship with each person that signs up via autoresponders but you must add value, you must spend the time it takes to produce high quality content that you mail out to them, educating them (impartially if possible!) as to the best option for them and why and show them where to get it (ideally you but if you aren’t the best option then work harder to be and then you can market with the highest integrity!)  a good CRM stystem with auto responders that change depending what a user does (clicks a link, fills another form in etc.) will pay back many times over from drip marketing and lead nurturing over the days, weeks or months it sometimes takes to complete the buying cycle

The medium intent keywords are an opportunity to compare a few models and highlight which is cheaper or better, again this needs to be done conservatively until you have a data pool to make informed choices from.

The high intent keywords can now run as normal in their own campaign but hopefully you’ll be covering the research keywords in the new low intent campaign so that now the high intent campaign should be free of low intent keyword searches and function with better CTR’s and quality scores as a result.

AdWords tracking and Google Analytics is are great tools but sometimes the full sales cycle is outside the scope of their tracking timescales so it would be prudent to test a third party attribution modelling system to try to understand your customers full buying cycle, we will be featuring a case study shortly on attribution modelling and this will really open your eyes as to how many times users can interact with a website before they actually make a buying decision.