Marketing is all about building a deep understanding of your customers and using it to inform your product strategy, go-to-market strategy and advertising mix. A couple months ago, adCenter released a nearly-free tool that gives you access to much of the data Microsoft has stored internally about your web site, your customers and what they are looking for online. In this article I'll show you how to use this to further your own marketing efforts.
What do search engines think your page is about?
The first thing to look at are the Keyword Extraction and Keyword Suggestion features of the toolbar. Combined, these features help you understand what a search engine sees when it looks at your page. If that isn't exactly what you think will resonate with you customers, then you can use the keyword expansion tool to look for different types of synonyms that might resonate more effectively with your customers.
A classic example of this is with Microsoft's MSDN portal for developers. Most customers refer to "Visual Basic" as VB and that's what they type into a search engine. But Microsoft's branding guidelines state that we should stress the full name of the product. The end results is that customers have a difficult time finding authoritative content when searching for "VB".
The keyword suggestion tool has 3 modes of finding synonyms: Campaign Association - choose synonyms based on what other keywords advertisers are buying, Contained - similar words from content on the web and Similarity - based on similar words in our taxonomy.
To use the tool on your site, select a page on your web site, enter the URL in cell A1, then click on the Keyword Extraction button. This shows you the list of keywords that a search engine may find interesting on your web site. For this example, I've used Barack Obama's list of campaign issues.
The key question to ask yourself with these results is "Are these the words my customers will search for?". If not, use the keyword suggestion tool to see if you can find some better alternatives and include those in your page text.
Who are your customers?
Once you've taken a look at some of your pages and you feel like you've got a good sense of what keywords represent your site or your content, you can use the demographic tools to find out more information about the folks search for those terms.
The tool provides information on Gender, Age, and Geography. To use this, simply select one or more keywords in excel and click the appropriate button (Geography or Demographics). Tip: highlight the data and select Bar Chart from the Insert menu.
How many people are searching?
You can also use the tool to determine how frequently people are searching for your terms, and what other terms in a particular category are spiking over a specific period of time. The tool will also extrapolate the trend data several months into the future using a regression technique.
To get the trend data, simply select your keywords, and click on the Monthly Traffic button (note you can see daily or monthly traffic). The following is the monthly traffic for some of the current presidential candidates, with the most recent 3 months extrapolated. Sometimes analysts use this to infer trends within audiences or markets, I would be careful not to read too much into this and bet your whole business on it. But it can be an extremely useful when used in combination with other information about your customers or industry. (or just to show pretty charts to your boss)
One word of caution on the buzz index, the data is not filtered in the same way Google Trends is, so you may see some noise, like people searching for things like "politic". Some editorial staff use this data as one source in defining the topics they should write about to ensure they are producing the stories people are looking for.
The "buzz index" is associated within a particular category, not a specific keyword. To create a report, click on the Buzz Search button, and select a category you're interested in. Note that the numbers correspond to the actual number of times those keywords were searched for in Live Search & MSN Search.
So as you continue to increase your knowledge of your customer and market, you should spend the $5 and download the adCenter add-in for Excel. It provides a treasure trove of information about your business and your customers that should take you a little bit further in understanding them and thus building better products and marketing campaigns.