Many years ago, in business school, I took a bunch of marketing classes. One of the basic tenets I learned was the customer buying cycle.
A common description of the buying cycle is the AIDA process:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Customers theoretically go through these phases as they make a buying decision. The process may be very fast for impulse purchases, or it could take years for a complex, high-priced product or service.
In online marketing, we often describe buying phases as awareness, consideration, and demand generation.
I’m often surprised at how many PPC advertisers really don’t think about the buying cycle when crafting their campaigns. By targeting your PPC campaigns and landing pages to each phase of the buying cycle, you can really take your PPC performance to the next level.
At gyro, we’ve had good success with segmenting and targeting PPC traffic. I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks. For now, here are some resources for you to learn more about targeting PPC campaigns to customer intent.
The first is a post from Search Engine Watch by Ted Rooke on leveraging customer intent. It’s a step-by-step approach to understanding customer intent.
The other good resource I found recently was published on the Acquisio blog just a couple of days ago. It’s by Greg Myers, and it covers the importance of keyword classification in PPC marketing. Greg provides good explanations and useful visuals on understanding keyword classification.
How have you segmented your PPC traffic? Discuss in the comments!
