Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Measurement

Search measurement is one of the most important aspects of monitoring your Web site.  Initially, the rank order of the most frequent search queries for your onsite search will give you the content priorities for your Web site.  This is content that is not immediately apparent to a site visitor when viewing your pages.  Provide the answers to these frequent queries in your earliest site adjustments.

 

Assuming you have some relevant information on your Web site, you will have some referral traffic from Google.  Study these referral search terms.  These are the branded concepts where your brand is top of mind for the Google visitor.  These are anonymous visitors at this point so the value of these visitors is in question but these are the terms that are bringing visitors to your site.  You can treat this traffic as a tactical opportunity. In reality, these concept phrases, good or bad, are your public brand on the web.

 

Once you have the basic corrections in place from your onsite queries, you can begin to tune the results and begin to add some marketing spin to your search navigation.  For every one of the top 200-400 queries, you should put those into your tool and verify that your best promotional answer is delivered to this query.  A good promotional page is fast, relates to the query from the user, delivers your brand message, and has a clear objective on the best way to exit this page (transaction, sample, download, etc.).

 

Your promotions here onsite can be simple, display highly used/purchased items related to the search query, or complex, personal profile targeted discount offers including localization for that moment in time.  The choice is driven by your desired brand experience and ROI.  Remember, the customer experience should always rank toward the top of your decision tree.

 

Measure the success of your search results: total number of queries, top key words, rank over time, objective success, speed of download, and not found results.  Not found results can be particularly frustrating to a visitor.  Correcting these sooner is better.

 

A second level nuance of measurement is to isolate registered user top account queries.  These can be very useful in identifying new business opportunities at your most important customers.  In a consumer space, personalization here may be valuable.  For the business site, monitoring these top account queries can be very insiteful of the next trend or business opportunity.  I alway monitor my top account queries daily.

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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