Too often, I perform a Google search and click on the ad that best represents what I’m looking for only to arrive at a page that is a distant cousin of what that ad said. I’m left to sort through the counter-intuitive set of links and sales babble only to back out and choose again. Why? Why do people still spend 20, 50 even 100K per month on paid search only to drop the ball when it comes to giving people what they want?
Search marketing, with all of the advanced tracking technology that surrounds it, creates the best opportunity to truly give someone what they want when they want it. The problem, I believe, stems from a disconnect between the marketers who drive the traffic and the designers who manage the site. In my 10 years in the web design and Interactive marketing world I’ve seen countless dollars wasted because specific people with specific needs are all funneled in through the same general door – typically the home page.
Advances in analytics (Google Analytics is free yet the adoption rate is still far too low), robust testing platforms (again often times free!), and a whole host of white papers and best practice guides can help you segment your user groups and create the perfect landing page environments. A host of tools, some provided within the search engines themselves, help you properly tag, track and allocate your leads and sales properly. The combination of the before the click intelligence and the after the click analytical data can help you ensure that when someone searches for an “XL green widget”, they arrive at a page all about XL green widgets, not the home page of WidgetsandMore.com.
As part of an agency that manages search marketing campaigns at the most sophisticated and granular level, I guess I should be somewhat grateful that many of our client’s competitors don’t. In the end, they will all be forced to adapt or they will be priced out of the market. With the importance now placed on Quality Score within Google, even the least sophisticated among search marketers should have begun to realize that they have a target on their back and a siphon sticking out of their pocketbook!