Search Funnel and Path Analysis – The Holy Grail

It was announced earlier this week that Google launched their sales funnel tracking product.  This is a positive move in the right direction because there has been complete industry reliance on last click data to optimise search campaigns. Put simply, this new data will allow brands to monitor the entire consumer search journey from research to purchase. Moreover, it will also provide insights into the length of time from first to last click and thus further inform us on the entire sales cycle.

Outrider and GroupM Search proprietary research shows that “assist” keywords play a crucial role in the success of a campaign but failure to purchase these provides a competitor a distinct advantage by not being present on these keyword impressions. These insights together with the launch of Google search funnel will provide a new and interesting way to effectively invest our client’s budgets.

To date approaches such as portfolio bid management has leveraged last click wins – analysing the ROI of each keyword and not looking at the role these “assist” keywords play in a paid search campaign. Yes, your overall impression share might drop along with Paid search ROI at the expense of overall conversion search volumes. This might be acceptable to some clients if they are convinced that search operates in total isolation.

But more importantly, has the lost opportunity to optimise the entire media mix, including search, been discussed with clients? E.g. If we drive consumers to search from offline activity can we refine our overall media spend and ultimately achieve cost efficiencies across the entire media investment versus treating each media channel in isolation? Search is still more efficient than traditional media so why not take advantage of the consumer intent generated via search campaigns and minimise wastage of offline media?

As search continues to be the lynchpin of the overall media mix it will become increasingly importantly that budget is allocated to fund “assist” search terms otherwise competitors will leverage your offline media investment and happily intercept search traffic if you are not present.

The Google sales funnel fails to include SEO and thus is limiting. Outrider data shows that there is an interplay between SEO/SEM and consumers will click on either paid or organic search listings as long as the copy is relevant.

To that end, as technology vendors continue to invest in complete path analysis, integrating display and search, marketers will ultimately become the beneficiaries of more insights and only then will we see a dramatic shift of budgets from traditional media to digital.

Tags: google adwords, offline media, Paid Search, roi, sales funnel, search funnel, search journey