Search News: Don’t Be Fooled by the Noise of Volume
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 3, 2009 | Share This
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Someone owes me a beer. Last month I read a post on Nielsen Online Research’s blog, the headline of which was “Online Vehicle Shopping Increases, Underscores Potential for Increased Sales.” I leapt from my desk chair and screamed “I’ll bet any of you a beer that sales go down.” Then I wiped the spittle from my lip.
Granted this was an easy bet to make – the auto industry as a whole has been suffering from month over month decreases. So why was Nielsen so all-fired sure that sales would increase? Site traffic, plain and simple.
Well the auto industry sales numbers for February rolled in today and they sure enough are as dismal overall as I expected. So why was site traffic up and what did it mean?
We have seen this happen with search engine queries in the past, and in fact at the most recent OMMA Behavioral conference I was chatting with someone who told me that Google had seen a comparable rise in search traffic over auto terms (something I can’t confirm but am happy to pass along.)
Turns out clever Google drew the same conclusion I did: the recession is leading people to be more careful about purchase decisions, particularly when it comes to big ticket items. Search and site volumes have risen in the auto sector purely as a function of comparison and cross-shopping rather than as an indicator of latent demand. It may very well turn out that for each sale made, buyers are visiting more sites and running more searches than they have in the past.
In an industry as metrics happy as search and social media marketing, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the numbers don’t always necessarily mean what we think. My analysis may not have been any more scientific at the end of the day than Nielsen’s, but I was able to put it into a better context than they were.
In a way this reminded me of how some marketers and clients can get so keyword-centric that they lose sight of how important their landing page is. They may be able to goose the number of people checking out their site but without a great landing page it’s a lot harder to convert that into something that meets overall business objectives.
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Topics: Advertising: Online, ECommerce, Google, SEM: Paid Search, Search: News, Web Analytics |
Great Opening. And good point regarding the economy, search and conversions.