Using Search Queries to Understand Buyers

One of the things that I talk about quite frequently is thinking about the prospects' buying process rather than our own selling process. Thinking in this way is key to making sure that we deliver the right message to each buyer based on where he or she is in his or her own thinking.


I wrote about the topic over on the digital body language blog here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/02/scoring-stages-of-buying-process.html


This discussion though quickly leads to the question of what to look for to give an indication that a prospect is at a certain phase of their buying process. One place to look is in search queries - the full search term used, not just individual key words.


I pulled some examples from the raw data in Eloqua's own marketing to give you a sense of this. In the first list, you can see general, pain-related and category-related terms, "lead management", "demand generation", terms that are only related to the general space in which Eloqua operates such as "marketing service provider", and terms that are clearly education-oriented, such as "digital body language".


Individuals with these search queries are, more likely than not, in an early education phase of their buying process. They are trying to learn about possible opportunities, or looking into solutions for pains that are somewhat related to what we solve.

At this phase in the buying process, high level thought leadership, ideas, and market research are often most of interest.

The next set of terms seems to be one step further down the buying funnel. By looking for more specific details such as "lead generation software", or detailed use cases like "marketing automation case study", we can see the buyer is progressing to the phase where he or she is looking to discover specific solutions to a more well formed view of a problem or an opportunity.

Being clearly visible (SEM and SEO) to searchers on terms at this phase in the buying process is key, as they are often looking to put together a list of possible vendors.

As buyers move further through the process, and begin to validate their chosen solution, or finalize their decision among two or three short list vendors, their search terms begin to get much more specific.

Often at this phase, you will see your own company name, and a very tactical query. Pricing, objections, issues, and specifications will often show up. From a marketing perspective, ensuring that information on key decision points and objections is readily available is key.

Also, as you work with your sales organizations, ensuring that they have insight into this aspect of their buyer's digital body language is critical as they can understand how the decision is progressing, and what top-of-mind issues are happening. Presenting that digital body language in their CRM system, or through Prospect Profiler can be a great way to keep sales armed with developments at the buyer's organization

Understanding Traffic Sources

In a couple of posts recently, I have talked about setting up online referrer campaigns to track where your traffic is coming from, and then how to look at individual web visitors and understand where they were last referred from.

This data is also very interesting looked at in aggregate in order to understand which of your online sources are driving the most traffic. To do this in Eloqua is quick and simple. In the web profiling -> Referrers area, choose the channel (such as Online Media) that you want to understand better and select the "View Marketing Campaign Breakdown" option. This will show you all of the campaigns you have configured under that channel, and give you a breakdown of those campaigns by the traffic that they have sourced.


The resulting report, of course, can be added to email updates or custom dashboards, to give you an ongoing sense of where your traffic is coming from. In our case, for example, we learned that our discussions on Twitter were sourcing more traffic than we had anticipated (although yes, the data to the left has been slightly disguised...).

By setting up tracking for relevant blogs that have high profile links to your site, you can gain an understanding of whether those references are driving traffic, and how much. In our case, I learned that Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent, Adam Needles Propelling Brands, and Jep Castelein's Lead Sloth were interesting sources of traffic to Digital Body Language recently.

Most Recent Campaigns as Source of Insight

I wrote recently about setting up Online Media referrer campaigns to track where your visitors are coming from. It's a simple but powerful technique in Eloqua to give you better insight into what sites are driving traffic your way.


This is equally valuable though, when looked at from the other direction. For each visitor on your website, you can see what the most recent referral campaign was that drove them to your site. With the tracking already set up, all we have to do is add that as a field to their visitor profile view.


Under the web profiling area, edit the profile view you want to show the most recent referrer campaign. Under profile fields, you should see an option for "most recent marketing campaign". Add that field to the appropriate spot in your profile view. You will also see similar fields for most recent search query, most recent channel, etc. All of these can be used in a similar manner, and can provide some very interesting insight into online media sources, blogs, and even Twitter.


With that in place, now when you use that Profile View for your reports, you will have columns that show the most recent online referral campaigns that drove each visitor to your site. Presenting this information in your visitor reports, especially those going out to your sales team can provide very important information as part of the prospect's digital body language.

Social Media Tracking - Inbound Referrals

As social media becomes an increasingly relevant environment in which your prospective buyers learn about your industry or your solutions, you need a way to understand its influence from a marketing perspective. Luckily, this is easy to do in Eloqua, you can use Referrer Tracking to track which blogs are sending visitors your way.

To give you an idea of how we can do this, I’ll use an actual example from the Digital Body Language blog. Valeria Maltoni on Conversation Agent referred to the Digital Body Language blog in a post on her site. That post began driving traffic, and I wanted to understand what that traffic was looking like.

In this case, Valeria had been kind enough to insert a custom tracking query string (more on that later as it opens up some interesting options), but in most cases you won't have that, so we'll set up referrer tracking assuming that custom tracking query string wasn't there.

To set it up, I went to the Web Profiling -> Referrers area and created a new Online Media campaign. These track external campaigns based on two main things, the referring URL and the landing URL. I set this up so that any visitors to any Eloqua web property (the Digital Body Language blog is tracked as part of the overall set of Eloqua web properties) that came from Conversation Agent would be marked as being part of this referrer campaign for reporting purposes.

This was done by adding the Conversation Agent URL as a referring URL, and leaving the landing URL blank. By checking the box to check for past website activity, anyone visiting from this referral recently would automatically be added. Given that we often don't know in advance of a referral in social media, and the traffic spike will happen within a day or two, this is a very useful ability.

To see which visitors came to the blog from Conversation Agent, all we have to do is select the “View Marketing Campaign Visitors” menu item, and we’ll see a list of the visitors that came from Valeria’s referral link.

What we’ve done for tracking a referring blog as an online referral source can be done with any similar online source. If the referring site, landing URL, or both, are known, you can easily define that as an online referral source and quickly and easily understand which of your visitors have been referred via that source, without the need for custom links and query strings.

We've used this internally for any campaigns that drive traffic to our site, whether from blogs, industry analysts, or news. It provides a great perspective on where each individual is coming from, and traffic patterns in general.