Digital advertising—whether via search engine advertising, email marketing, display ads, web sites, whatever—is about relevance. It's about matching your message to the intent of your audience. If you understand this one bit—if you truly, totally, and unequivocally get it—you're already well ahead of your competition.

 

The value of adCenter Analytics is in tracking
behavior in increasingly granular segments in
order to provide increasingly relevant content.

Remaining relevant to your customers' intent presupposes that you understand that intent, and not just from a high altitude, 20,000 foot perspective but at the granular, gritty level.

Segmentation

Understanding your customers' behavior in increasingly fine increments is called segmentation. It isn't necessary to understand individual behavior, it may not even be desirable given the point of diminishing returns, but segmenting your visitors into smaller groups defined by common behaviors allows you to better understand the intent of that group.

Let's get concrete. Say you're advertising widgets on Microsoft adCenter. (Change the name to Google or Yahoo, if you'd like, and the example remains equally valid.) Keeping it simple, let's say you have only one ad group in your campaign. All of the keywords in that ad group share a common landing page:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html

When someone clicks on your search ad and arrives at your landing page, adCenter Analytics already knows both the search engine that referred the visitor and their query.  You can easily view adCenter Analytic’s Conversions by Referral report, drilling down by search engine to the actual query. Congratulations, you’re already segmenting your traffic.

If you’re running paid search campaigns and bidding on phrase or broad match types, the query string passed by the referrer—the search engine—may not map directly to your paid keyword. Say the keyword in your paid search campaign is “award winning widgets.” The ad that your visitor clicks might be triggered by a phrase match on “winning widgets” or a broad match on “widgets.” It’s the query you’ll see in adCenter Analytics, not the paid keyword. (Of course, if you’re only bidding on exact match type, the query is the keyword.) Without knowing which keyword in your search campaign was responsible for the referral, you can’t know which is more valuable—which actually generates revenue and how much. 

For a metric to be useful, it must be actionable. In our example, you need to map your paid search visitor to the actual campaign keyword. You decide to add the keyword to your destination URL in adCenter.

 

 Your landing page URL now looks like this:  

www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}

(For more information on building dynamic destination URLs, see Dynamic Text in adCenter.)

When your ad is served, the value of {Keyword} is inserted into the URL. In our example the keyword is "award winning widgets." That keyword will appear in the URL whether the ad was triggered by a phrase match on "winning widgets" or a broad match on "widgets." You can now easily track the success of your keyword using adCenter's Conversion by Referral report. But what can you do to increase your conversion rate for that keyword?

 Divining Intent

 

One superficial but effective tactic is to program your web page to insert the keyword as a page title. In our example, the page title generated by this bit of coding, properly capitalized, would be "Award Winning Widgets." Going a step further, you can make some assumptions about their intent based upon their keyword. They may be comparing your widgets with your competitors so you write a paragraph about your product's competitive advantages and dynamically insert it into your landing page whenever the URL includes that keyword.

Does it work? You'll have to test your changes against the original, unchanged landing page. AdCenter Analytics will tell you if your modified page prompts more visitors to do what you hoped they'd do-buy your products, request your information, or subscribe to your newsletter. If they do, you have a winner. If not, at least you know what doesn't work and that has value, too.

Segmenting Three Deep

It's a good suggestion to segment any key performance indicator to a level three deep in order to understand the meaning of the statistic in greater detail. We've already segmented by search engine referrer and by keyword but what if your ad group has several different ads, each with different ad copy and a slightly different appeal? Wouldn't it be helpful to know which ad is driving sales and which is simply costing you money?

It's almost a trivial matter for you to add another adCenter parameter to your destination URLs which now looks like this:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}&adid={AdID}

Now the same keyword can be tracked separately for each ad, providing insight into the effectiveness of your ad copy. What could be more actionable than knowing which ad is generating revenue-and how much?

Bottom Line

Segmenting your web traffic can provide additional insight into your visitor's behavior, insight that can be acted upon to improve your conversion rate. Understanding their behavior and divining their intent is a prerequisite to providing more relevant content. It's more work, no doubt, but the work can have a huge effect on your bottom line.