The Importance Of Search Data In Your Marketing

I’m not going to lie, search has better data than any other digital channel.

Search might not have third-party data, as much contextual data, viewability stats or engagement/rollover metrics; but search queries are more informative because they provide accurate information about users and their mindsets.

[pullquote]Get your search data into your other channels.[/pullquote]

When we categorize keywords, we tend to put them into three separate groupings:

• Keyword type (e.g. navigational, transactional or informational).
• Intent (buy now, best, cheapest, etc).
• Product type (home insurance vs car insurance).

Armed with this knowledge about what a person has searched for, we know how to treat them. If it comes down to a “data shootout”, search is the strongest contender.

If I have a user who has browsed my pages about personal loans but searched for “savings accounts,” I need to choose whether I want to talk to him about loans or savings. Since one of those is a direct unambiguous signal from the user saying “tell me about this,” loans win every time.

So search is valuable. Nobody is shocked by that concept. What people rarely do is follow up the next step. To take advantage of your digital marketing opportunities, you must get your search data into your other channels.

When I’m serving a display ad, it helps to know what that person searched for. When I’m running a YouTube ad, of course any search queries are relevant.

Several technologies exist to help with this, but they’re all expensive or complicated. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re overkill.

Over on Marketing Land we’re focussing a series of articles on this subject, about how data interacts and can/should be shared, and how you can do it without enterprise-level data resources.

Visit here to read the full first installment of the series, and keep checking back as we explore the entire marketing data landscape and how you can leverage it for your business.