Hold the front page! Google have announced on the AdWords blog that they are introducing yet another new report: AdWords Search Funnels.

OK, at first glance this might not sound that interesting but I this is the kind of thing could have a big impact on SEO and copywriting if you’re savvy.  Firstly these reports show the ads visitors clicked on prior to a purchase (and a whole host of other things).  Here is an example:

1. Bob searches for “broadband” and the ad for Virgin Media shows up, Bob clicks the ad, but soon backs out because he wants to shop around first.
2. Bob searchs for “broadband comparison”, again the Virgin Media ad shows up, Bob doesn’t click it this time as he is looking to compare prices, instead he clicks on an organic link and finds out which broadband provider he wants.  In the end he decides on Virgin Media, but he has to get off the computer to cook for his wife.
3. The next day Bob goes back to Google and types in “Virgin broadband” – he clicks the ad for Virgin again and orders a broadband installation.

Now from this example you will be able to see in the reports:

• That a customer previously clicked on an ad with the keyword “broadband”, then searched for “broadband comparison” and the ad was shown but they didn’t click, then finally he typed in “Virgin broadband” and converted.
• You will be able to see that Bob did his research the 1 day before converting.

Why is this a big deal?

Prior to this when analysing conversions in Analytics it would only attribute a conversion to the last click (unless you did some jiggery pokery). That’s great to a degree but it doesn’t give you any context about the buying process or brand awareness.

So this change will allow you to analyse keywords far more effectively. One of the biggest troubles many companies have is trying to filter out ‘research only’ terms from ‘buying terms’. Of course, you want to be present at both stages, but research terms are often very broad – think of ‘fashion’ or ‘cruise holidays’ or ‘TVs’ – and require big domain authority.

Through these AdWords funnels, you’ll be able to identify which keywords are for research and which keywords are the money terms and develop a strategy accordingly.

If you find that a keyword is a research term, the copy on the page should be concentrated on acting as a convincer so that your website sticks in their mind when they move onto the next stage. You might want to do that by having different target pages for the terms, rather than loading a single page with both terms as is still pretty commonplace. Your ‘research’ page can concentrate on delivering your brand to people and great information that makes your site a fantastic resource. Your ‘conversion’ page is then freed up to focus on USPs, price and motivators to close the deal.

This could be the thing to tip Converstion Optimisation over into more mainstream use.

You can see the overview video below: