We can learn a lot about our site’s visitors based on the keywords they searched for on Google to find us. One way to segment those visitors is based on in which stage of the marketing funnel the visitor most likely belongs.
Zoom out with me for a second to review the concept of the marketing funnel; it pretty clearly outlines the process a typical customer might go through as they become aware, familiar, preferring, purchasing, and recommending your brand.
The stages of the funnel are roughly .. Unawareness …Awareness …Preference/Liking …Purchase (…Repeat purchase …Advocacy…Fanboy-ism)
Peer into the Marketing Funnel for Insights on site visitors
For example, searchers looking to ‘research’ or ‘compare’ lcd tvs are likely in the top of the funnel, as are those looking for ‘best LCD tvs’, or ‘top-selling’, ‘most-popular’ LCD TVs. Meanwhile, those looking for LCD TV reviews are likely somewhere in the middle, and those looking to ‘buy’ LCD TV or ‘Sony Bravia 46″‘ are probably towards the bottom.
Now to the meat of the post. (ie.. How can I operationalize this concept beyond theoretical navel-gazery?)
- Set up separate ad groups representing each of the stages of the Funnel that you wish to impact. This is probably a good idea anyway; your keyword quality scores are a function of relevance to a theme within an ad group.
- Create separate landing pages for each stage of the funnel. Aside from making the tracking work, this one also falls into the ‘it’s probably a good idea anyway’ bucket, since you’ll be able to tailor your landing page copy to speak directly to folks within the funnel stage they’re in.
- Flag each landing page with a Google Analytics custom variable indicating which section of the marketing funnel they most likely belong to. For example, someone searching for keywords related to ‘Compare’ could be flagged as someone in the ‘Awareness’ stage.
To set this up, we’ll need to use the following javascript prior to the trackPageview call.
The arguments here are documented on Custom Variables – Google Analytics – Google Code. Basically, the first argument is the variable slot (1-4) Assuming you aren’t already using this feature elsewhere, stick with 1 here. The Second argument is the Name of the cusomt variable we’re defining (“Funnel Stage”). The third argument is the value of the variable (“Awareness”), and the forth argument is the level we’re interested in setting the variable.
Here, 1 in the forth argument means ‘visitor level’. In other words, subsequent visits to the site will also be flagged as ‘Awareness’, until it’s overwritten by another landing page. Here’s the elegant part. The value will stick with the user (which probably makes sense, until the prospect showed some indication of ‘Liking’ later on).
Stay tuned for my next post on how to segment visitors coming from organic search.
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