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Tag : CTR

Intent to Purchase

We’re avid fans of search marketing for demand generation-focused campaigns (both search engine marketing and search engine optimization). Even as other platforms begin to offer enhanced levels of targeting to match the capabilities of search engine marketing, and even in situations where one can identify specific customers (through data mining, for instance), we believe that for most life science companies SEM & SEO offers superior value for demand generation. Why? When properly targeted, searchers have the greatest amount of commercial intent. In other words, they are more likely to be looking for information to help them make a purchase than are scientists targeted via other channels.

As a bit of a case study, I’ll use a recent scenario. I was discussing marketing with the owner of a small life science company who does a reasonable amount of sales through e-commerce. He was complaining about the cost of CPC advertising on Google AdWords. The company does a lot of blogging, and the blogs were disseminated quite broadly to many large life science-focused groups on LinkedIn. He bragged that the traffic resulting from blogging was extremely inexpensive (the effective CPC was probably 5% – 10% of the CPC through AdWords), the unique viewers per month was very high for a company of its size and traffic was still increasing at a good clip (most traffic was a result of the blog). Sales, however, weren’t where he felt they should be.

This case illustrates two points. 1) unique visitors is a vanity metric – it doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert those visitors to sales at a satisfactory rate. 2) Not all marketing channels will produce viewers with the same commercial intent. In fact, the intent to make a purchase can vary wildly across channels. Simply reaching your target market with just about any message is usually good for the purpose of awareness (although awareness is useless if the audience doesn’t have a reason to remember you and you don’t regularly re-engage them) but for demand generation you need to reach the audiences that have the intent to purchase a product, and specifically a product such as yours. Targeting anyone in your target market often doesn’t do the trick, especially if your target market isn’t extremely well defined.

If you think about what customers do when they are considering a purchase, it makes sense that search is the medium of choice for demand generation campaigns. They either a) have a brand in mind already and go directly to that brand, eschewing shopping around, b) ask a colleague for a recommendation or c) look for information through search engines. These three behaviors encompass almost every scientist when considering a purchase. There is only one of those things that you can have a significant effect on in the short-term and that is making sure you show up where they search. You can try to create a positive and memorable overall brand experience to influence the brand preferences of the scientist and his / her colleagues, but that isn’t something that can be done over the short term and often requires that customers have a significant degree of experience with your company in the first place (hence why attempts to generate demand via brand-building alone are something of a catch-22).

Small life science companies often don’t have the finances or time to wait around for campaigns to pay off in the long-term. Most need to see an ROI in the short-term to stay afloat. To generate those shorter-term revenues your campaigns need to focus on the places where you can target not just your target market, but the members of your target market with commercial intent.

"Looking to increase your advertising ROI? Do you want to know the messages and channels that will allow you to most efficiently drive demand? Contact BioBM. Our experienced life science marketing managers will help your company create and deploy campaigns to build demand for your products and grow your revenues."

SEO: Optimizing Clickthrough

You’ve seemingly done everything right – you have lots of high-quality backlinks pointing to the relevant page and the page has an optimized title, URL, and header tags. You have well-optimized content and lots of it, and your domain and site have “aged”. You’ve avoided any “black hat” tricks that could get you penalized. So why aren’t your search engine rankings where they should be? It’s not an uncommon problem, and there’s generally only two answers: 1) You’ve underestimated your competition, or 2) Your clickthrough is poor.

If you know a few things about SEO, you probably heard a lot of talk about backlinks and content / page optimization, but those are by no means the only important factors in SEO. Your search results also need to appeal to the scientists that are doing the searching. Think about it: Google is in the business of helping internet users find the content that they’re looking for. People use Google more than other search engines primarily because of the quality of the search results. If a result isn’t being clicked on, then that indicates that it’s less relevant than other results. If it’s less relevant, then it’s in the search engines’ best interest to return a different result for that query that is more relevant and the experience is better for the users.

If you keep a close eye on your Google rankings, for example, you probably noticed that your rankings for some terms will occasionally bounce around a bit. That’s usually Google performing clickthrough testing – seeing if another result would be of more interest to the users.

Optimizing Clickthrough

So what is the life science marketer to do? A few things. First, pay attention to your meta description attribute. While this attribute is not included in Google’s algorithms that determine search ranking, this attribute is generally what will display as the descriptive text under the link in the search results and therefore effects clickthrough. Be sure that’s relevant and interesting. Including language used in the search term will help as well. Secondly, think about what searchers for that term will be looking for and what the page you’re optimizing is offering. Are searchers going to be interested in cell-based assay products but your highest-ranking result is a blog post? Conversely, may they be interested in informational content about pre-clinical toxicology but your result offers it as a service? Perhaps they are looking for stem cell culture protocols but your result is for a white paper. Regardless of the exact reason, you could be significantly impacting your clickthrough if your optimized result is not what the searchers are looking for.

Measuring Clickthrough

Unfortunately, you cannot measure clickthrough in Google Analytics since there is no information provided about impressions. You can, however, use Google Webmaster Tools. The “Search Queries” menu will show you the ballpark number of impressions for any given search term, the average position in search results for that term, and the amount of clicks those impressions led to as well as the CTR (provided you have more than 10 clicks for the given term). Keep in mind that unlike Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools only retains data from the past 90 days, so if you want to keep track of clickthrough long-term you’ll want to export it.

You can do everything right – have high-quality links, well-optimized content, etc. – but if your clickthrough is poor your SEO will suffer. Life science marketers who measure and optimize for clickthrough will be rewarded with higher search rankings.

"If search engine optimization is a big mystery to you, or if your SEO efforts simply aren’t yielding the results you hoped, contact BioBM. Our Life Science SEO services have driven rankings and traffic for many companies across the life sciences. See what our clients are saying about us."