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Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The rea­son is sim­ple – never before have prospects so clearly told adver­tis­ers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­imise this opportunity.

The con­cept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effec­tively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find cam­paigns that were all point­ing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely lim­ited inter­nal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that some­one arriv­ing from a spe­cific search such as “prod­uct x specs” will not imme­di­ately see the prod­uct they are expect­ing, and pos­si­bly just hit the back but­ton in frus­tra­tion and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Sec­ondly, even if they are deter­mined enough, and decide to give the site a sec­ond chance, they still have to find their way through via inter­nal nav­i­ga­tion and search func­tion­al­ity. This leaves them vul­ner­a­ble to get­ting lost, frus­trated and ulti­mately giv­ing up, and return to their search engine of choice for a bet­ter match to their orig­i­nal query.

Sim­plis­ti­cally, there are two lev­els of seg­men­ta­tion when it comes to key­words and land­ing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Cat­e­gory, Prod­uct, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, com­pare, com­plain, trou­ble shoot

At the first level, adver­tis­ers will send cat­e­gory searches (e.g. “print­ers”) to a cat­e­gory page, and prod­uct spe­cific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the prod­uct page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the sec­ond level, the adver­tiser will utilise the search mod­i­fiers to bet­ter under­stand what the con­sumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y spec­i­fi­ca­tions”) will send traf­fic to the cor­re­spond­ing sub page or sec­tion of the land­ing page.

While this might seem like com­mon sense and straight for­ward to imple­ment, there are a few things to con­sider. The sec­ond level of seg­men­ta­tion increases the com­plex­ity of the cam­paign by quickly mul­ti­ply­ing the num­ber of indi­vid­ual land­ing pages. These indi­vid­ual land­ing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, acces­si­ble and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, adver­tis­ers can expect hap­pier site vis­i­tors and improved con­ver­sion rates.

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