The Buying Cycle

The buying cycle is something that every one of us goes through when shopping online. This a very complex subject and there is a lot of literature out there so we are not going to go to much in depth about how this works. We want to just raise awareness that this exists and provide a practical example of how keeping this in mind can help you find better keywords for your marketing campaign. Let s say that what you sell ipods and want to know what keywords to use in your campaign to capture people who are interested in buying an iPod. Here is an example how the buying cycle might work in this scenario. A prospect hears about the product and they re interested in its features, or want to find some other information about the product such as what models are available, what are their specifications or what types of applications run on it. The prospect now knows which model they are interested in and they want to find out some sort of price so what they usually do is do a bit of comparison shopping to figure out where they can get the best price and offer. Finally they make the purchase or decide not to. So how can we apply this to AdWords and PPC as a whole? Simple - the keywords and adverts that we use will attract people at different stages of their buying cycle. For example, if you are using the keywords iPod info or iPod nano it s likely that you will capture people researching the product and wanting to find details about it. So you will be capturing users that are in the first part or research stage of their buying cycle. Instead, if you use the keyword Apple iPod nano 8GB , you are most likely to capture prospects who know what they want already. Similarly, if you are using the keywords buy ipod nano or prices ipod nano , you will capture a prospect that has done their research and are prepared to commit to buying the product. This information will hopefully help you find keywords that are more likely to result in conversions and sales. It also may help you with your bidding strategy such as paying less for keywords that are in the earlier stages of the buying cycle and more for ones that are towards the end. Alexander and his colleagues at Advertise PPC have helped numerous companies make their AdWords accounts profitable and cost-effective. If you are a business running Google AdWords and need assistance to improve your accounts performance please do not hesitate to visit our website and have a look at our services ad-vertise.co.uk or give a us a call on 0208 819 2632 for a free consultation.