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Google launches AdWords Search Funnels

At the end of March, Google announced the launch of AdWords Search Funnels, a new series of reports made available to advertisers that provide a greater insight into the ad click and impression behaviour on Google that leads up to a final conversion – such as a sale, contact enquiry or newsletter signup.

The new Search Funnels reports are being rolled out to AdWords accounts over the next month or so and are more detailed than the information previously shown about a conversion, which just mentioned the details about the last search term and advert used before the conversion occurred. Now advertisers can see when customers perform multiple searches before finally converting and also show the full picture by giving an insight into the ads customers interact with during their shopping process. With more advertisers trying to track the 'attribution' of a final action, Google is adding a new level of data to try to explain this process.

Google is tracking activity by searcher over a 30 day period, so that it can link previous activity to an eventual conversion. Using a similar report format to Google Analytics, the following reports are now being made available to AdWords advertisers:

Sources Analysis

Interaction Analysis

Time Analysis

As shown above, the range of different reporting options are now much more extensive and also quite complex. Advertisers therefore need to understand what the data is showing and how it has been tracked. However, this change will allow advertisers to analyse keywords far more effectively and will help with one of the biggest problems companies have when trying to filter out 'research only' terms from 'buying terms', since research terms like 'fashion' or 'cruise holidays' or 'TVs' are often very broad. So through these AdWords funnels, advertisers can now identify which keywords are for research and which keywords are the money terms and develop a strategy accordingly.

This article was first published in the April 2010 edition of our monthly newsletter.

If you'd like more information about how Google's new Search Funnels could improve the marketing of your business, please contact us. Alternatively, please request a FREE website assessment and see what you could achieve with a successful search engine marketing campaign.