Understanding information driven keyword intent

by Jack.

Many web searching sessions start with a information driven keyword. These searches exist at the very top of the conversion funnel and takes place when the visitor is in the ‘information gathering’ phase of the buying cycle.

Typically the visitor is looking for facts and information about a particular product or service. By providing the right kind of content to the visitor at this time a website can not only increase share of mind but also expose its value proposition to a visitor early on in the buying cycle increasing the chance that the visitor will be loyal and ultimately result in a conversion.

The searching session itself can vary in length depending on how in depth the visitor wants to be.

In the below example Google has determined that the visitor behind this query has a information driven goal that is centred around the question ‘When was William Shakespeare born’. The result set is focused on sites that offer Shakespeare related facts. Google has even gone as far as to bring the answer to the question onto the SERP itself!

 

The intent of a search is not always so obvious. Often a visitor will reach a site using a single term such as ‘shakespeare’ and attempt to find the answer to ‘When was Shakespeare born’. If you are seeing  lots of instances in analytics of keywords with unknown intent there is not a huge amount you can do apart from asking real people what they expect the intent to be and building a model based on the data they provide.

 

To find examples of information driven intent on your own site focus on the long-tail. Key-phrases with more 3 words are a great indicator of information driven intent. You can use this data to help to asses the effectiveness of your information and sales pages!

Posted in SEO

New Google Analytics features that are worth getting excited about!

by Jack.

The analytics community is not generally known for its exciting news but some game changing announcements were made at the recent Google Analytics summit. If  these announcements are executed well they will make  enterprise competitors very worried indeed…

Universal Analytics

This is an absolutely massive announcement. A new protocol, way of tracking, additional dimensions all within a single cookie and a smaller JavaScript file (pagespeed!). These changes allow the customer to become the centre of the data allowing the possibility for analysts and website owners to align all of their data to the customer and not a random session ID. By using Dimension Widening we can import data sets from other platforms and systems and join them with existing Google Analytics data.

Some reports I can not wait to create using Dimension Widening are focused around ecommerce product data (be able to have real product names in reports) as well as customers who are subscribed to email/social channels.

In the past Analytics data was typically exported into heavier offline analysis tools. In theory this update enables Google Analytics to become the primary analytical platform for any multichannel business.

 

Cost Data Import

Currently Adwords and Adsense data are automatically imported. With Universal Analytics any cost data can be imported (e.g. email campaign costs). if this works properly it’s going to be a great tool for measuring marketing ROI.

 

RFM & LTV based reports

This is something I have been waiting for a long time for! You will finally be able to view data sets based on the RFM & LTV models. This is a massive step away from ‘session’ based reports that don’t always show the true picture of how a customer interacts with the site.