Understanding Customers' Search Behavior With Google Tools

Businesses today cannot expect to attract new customers with the same services or products that have been offered 10 years ago. The only way for you to keep up with the ever changing consumers' needs is to constantly analyse what is trending among customers in line with your business playground.

Discovering what everyone is looking for and be the go-to person is the secret recipe to generate sale leads, which will put your business ahead of your competitors. For example, if you specialize in Health and Beauty products, being able to offer exactly which type of products or which brand that your customers are talking about will set your business apart from the enormous marketplace.

Don't wait until your competitors steal your sales only to realize what you lack

In many cases, if you have already a variety of products, a single boost on a particular trending item can help improve overall sales performance. As today's product discovery and purchasing process take place mostly on the internet (especially on mobile devices), business owners today can easily access, collect and record data on customers shopping journey. This historical database reports will then provide a clearer vision of their future business plan.

Here are more reasons why must marketers must utilize data from customers' search behavior to ensure a successful marketing plan:

Gone are the days when companies try to persuade consumers that they have the best products that (they assume) everyone will need. The new retail "playbook" emphasizes on getting found by the customers for exactly what they want, which means you have to make a conscience effort to ensure your business is staying abreast of the local search trends.

The accuracy of Google's AdWords insights is extremely valuable for businesses to determine which products should be promoted on their site. A report by Fleishman-Hillard has shown that online shoppers are getting more active in new products discovery. More often than not, a person's shopping journey will start and end on the Internet. Hence, you can monitor their search behavior on a daily basis to easily spot the emerging trend on real time.

Once you have mapped out your company's next focus based on customers' interest, it is a piece of cake to build a strong impression on search engines like Google. It is also known as niche marketing whereas a business only focuses on those who are most likely to purchase their products. Not only will it help to gear your business towards the right direction but it also fuels marketers with the right set of information to convert visitors into customers in a shorter amount of time.

The essence of any new business establishment is to deliver down-to-earth products or services that the industry lacks to satisfy the current market demand. With a precise local consumers' analysis, business can better customize their services and products offered to fulfill the market needs on a more personal scale. In that way, you can ensure an excellent customer experience and encourage them to buy from your site. Put simply, if you have already pinpointed that your customers are interested in cosmetics, dive deeper into the topic and find out exactly which products will capture their buying intuition. Being the sole supplier will obviously give you the top-of-mind advantage.

So when it comes to building your e-commerce site, it is wise not to underestimate the power of customers' data analysis. In this case, we are examining the advantages of utilizing Google's free tools such as Google trends, Google AdWords and Google Search Console on deciding what to sell.

Google Trends – Real Time Discovery of Customers' Interest and Trending Topics
Google Trends is a fantastic tool for market research. It unlocks unique data of your industry which will help you to step inside the sales game fully equipped.

Google Trends offers visual graphs of local and regional search queries based on your search topic. It collects data from the previous years so that you can easily see if your current market is trending up or down. For example, you would like to consider boosting skin care products on your site within a selected time-frame; this is your first market research step:

Step 1: Use Google Trends to observe the customers' interest for cosmetics in Malaysia
The graph below shows a noticeable upward trend for the cosmetics search queries from 2005 till present in Malaysia. You can try out different search terms to get the most comprehensive data.

Step 2: Keep developing business ideas by looking up on related searches:
As you can see below, the top search queries provide wonderful insights on which products or brands that cosmetics buyers are looking for specifically. Out of these suggestions, Korean skin care products are quite dominant as compared with cosmetic products from other countries.

Google Keyword Planner – Research for Particular Keywords That Are Related to The Trending Topic

You don't have to set aside a huge budget to run AdWords campaigns in order to make the most out of Google Keyword Planner. In fact, this FREEmium tool is the ultimate resource to get to know your customers. The whole idea of doing keyword research is to discover what people are looking for as well as the popularity of the search terms. By collecting words or phrases that people use when searching on Google, marketers can ensure the effectiveness of their marketing focus through the actual search volume trends from time to time.

There are 3 ways you can apply to market research using Google Keyword Planner:

Example: Get search volume for a list of keyword or group them into ad groups
Shops selling skin care products can easily find out which Korean brands (e.g. Innisfree, Laneige and Sulwhasoo) to focus on and which ones are the most popular.

Google Search Console – Monitor and Compare the Specific Products During a Certain Period of Time

After you have conducted the solid business plan, including which products to sell as well as the marketing approach, the next big step is to monitor the performance of your campaign digitally.

The Search Console is not only for technical insights but also for marketing analysis. With this Google's webmaster tool, you will be able to gain a unique access to the Search Traffic metrics, which will give you not only a precise ranking positions for all search queries but also unique data to tell if customers are actually clicking on your optimized landing page.

Search Analytics for all queries:

It is extremely important to keep the CTR rate upward to ensure the product / brand that you are boosting is profitable. By keeping a track record of these the search traffic data from time to time, you will be able to adjust your approach immediately to the right direction. In order to effectively make changes to your marketing plan if required, you need to pay attention to the Impressions on Google versus Clicks ratio for a particular keyword that you targeted using the previous tools.

Demolishing Obstacles to Success with Data Driven Approach
With the availability of sophisticated free online tools to better understand your customers search behavior and the products they are most interested in, there shouldn't' be any reason holding back your E-Commerce business to adopt a more data driven approach when deciding which products to market.

As the online retail landscape becomes increasingly crowded and competitive, adopting such an approach can either drive the overall profitability of a business and let it flourish or hold it back form success