We read a really interesting article by Google that goes a long way to confirm some trends that we’ve been seeing in Google Adwords accounts. The article discusses user behaviours and that 90% of content consumption happens in front of two screens and that many conversions these days happen with the journey for researching a purchase happens on one device & the conversion happens on another.
The trend that we had been seeing was an increase in people arriving directly at the customers site, a reduction in adwords conversions, but an increase in revenue.  Now obviously you can attribute a lot to the great work that we do (wink), but this was really starting to skew our stats in understanding the conversion rates for the campaigns. In part of the testing, we got approval from the customer to perform testing using what has been historically a well converting keyword, but had over the past 6 months been tailing off.
We agree to disable this for a while and check the results of doing so. Sure enough, in that 24 hour period we were able to see a definite difference in the conversions and that keyword was definitely still a good revenue generator, but it was the behaviour of the end user that has continued to change.
An example of this is that Mandy (our example consumer), sits on the train with her smartphone and starts their journey of researching a very broad search term, for example “Cheese”. They find a series of adwords adverts and click through to relevant content and the consumer starts to identify the companies that sell cheese and possibly the types of cheese they might want to purchase. Mandy then arrive at work and does a good mornings graft for her boss, but then lunchtime comes. She already did the research on the way into the office on the train, so she has her shortlist of cheese companies and also the cheeses she wants to buy.
So she uses her work desktop computer to make her cheese order, visiting the sites that she saw in Adwords ads on her smartphone, but now either enters the url directly into her browser and clicking an ad for company or the SERP result that appears. Either way, it ends up being a conversion that started off as Cheese and then turned into a conversion on company name or as a direct visitor.
In all our ecommerce solutions we always setup our Adwords conversion tracking code with the hope that in Adwords, we get the right results and can make informed decisions from that data. Unfortunately with the changes in consumers, this means it’s getting more and more difficult to accurately do this.
Anyway, enough about Mandy.
We thought this was an interesting infographic that discusses the topic above and I would highly recommend reading this article on Think With Google. It makes for fascinating reading in our ever changing digital landscape.