In the screenshot below, it’s great to see the high affinity indexes for “Frequently dines out” and “30 minute chefs,” both of which indicate our customer prioritizes convenience and efficiency.
This learning can be applied to our next category of mid-flight research, which is an ad copy or creative test.
A/B testing
Using this same example, you might want to explore designing an A/B copy test that highlights your brand’s speedy delivery services, your lifetime guarantee, free returns or something else that may resonate with this audience.
Search query reports
Search query reports, or SQRs, should be run regularly during every campaign’s flight. These tell you exactly what searches are triggering your ads to serve and can be found by going to Campaigns > Search terms.
The cadence of checking these reports should be set by the amount of data coming in. If your campaign is getting ~100 searches per day, you’ll only need to check it once a week or once every other week.
If your campaigns generate thousands of searches an hour, it’s a good idea to check your SQRs daily to ensure you’re negating anything brand unsafe in the first week or two of a flight and then weekly from there.
SQRs are critical for market research.
How are your customers searching for your products in a brand campaign?
Are they frequently misspelling your top-selling products? Are they looking for how-to videos?
Are they existing customers looking for support or how to access their account?
These are all interesting behaviors for you as a marketer to know about.
How do customers’ queries match your business in a non-brand or competitor campaign?
Does one of your product categories have a sky-high click-through rate that you weren’t expecting?
Maybe a new product launch is getting super high engagement but no purchases?
These insights will help you inform your greater landing page experience, customer support and other marketing channels.
Post-campaign readouts
Some campaigns will run indefinitely, while those with a firm end date will be analyzed after completion.
Audience insights from a search campaign can greatly benefit other marketing channels and guide the next version of the campaign.
A few things to consider in a post-campaign read-out are:
Did your target audience behave the way you expected them to?
Perhaps your remarketing audiences performed less effectively than your prospecting segments. Does this mean that folks who already purchased something are less likely to buy again?
This is probably true for things like SaaS, credit cards or other big purchases, but would be interesting to find out for a CPG or retail item.
If repeat customers are few and far between, are they dissatisfied with what they purchased?
On the flip side, if new customers are trickling in at a snail’s pace, how can you change your messaging or approach to make sure they see the value of your brand?
How did your creatives perform?
It’s unlikely that all of your ads performed at similar click-through rates, conversion rates or had the same ad strength.
For search ads, check the effectiveness of your text ads and all your assets. Which sitelink was most popular? Did the ad highlighting a promotion blow its counterparts out of the water?
For Performance Max campaigns, which asset group had the best engagement? Was it the one you least expected? Did you test lifestyle images vs. product images and see an interesting breakout of volume?
What did your search query reports and audience insights reveal?
In other words, what did you learn that you can apply to your next test iteration? Are 90% of your customers based in California?
Do you need to make sure your customer support team works PST hours? Did most clicks come in for a query that should have been negated? Are people looking for your loyalty program being sent to the wrong landing page?
Make audience research an ongoing effort
Customers who come in through paid search are letting you know who they are, both through the demographic data we have about them and through the searches that they complete.
Google’s audience targeting has gotten stronger every year in terms of in-market segments, affinities, and the indexes we can read about compared to the types of conversions happening.
It’s incredibly important to analyze audiences in search campaigns continuously and consider every facet of reporting as audience research for your brand and cross-channel learnings.
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