MEASUREMENT OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Marvin Tanner
Vice President, Silicon Networks

Search Engine Marketing is the analytical measurement of responses to specific advertising on the Internet Search Engine Marketing professionals design and implement a search engine strategy for each client to maximize Internet exposure to a specific website.  The traditional methodology includes a hypothesis, media testing, and reporting the conclusions to the client.  "This is referred to as the nature of information search," as forwarded by  Hawkins, Best, and Coney in Consumer Behavior, Building Marketing Strategy (Hawkins, Best, and Coney; McGraw Hill Irwin, New York, 2004)

One study, Reno Investment Real Estate  sells Reno, Nevada Real Estate online to investors from around the world.   The first analytical test is to determine what users are searching for on the Internet.  GoodKeyWords is an ideal search tool to determine how users search on the Internet.  Few search for Reno, Nevada real estate, most search for Reno Nevada, instead.  Populating the RenoInvestmentRealtor with references to Reno, Nevada will push the ranking in Google and Yahoo for the site.  The second most popular search is for “Reno Nevada Hotels.”  Since Reno Investment Realtor sells hotels at Lake Tahoe, Nevada,  traffic can be generated by including “Reno Nevada Hotels for Sale” to the site.

 

Using eWebcounter as the tracking tool, analytical studies can be applied to RenoInvestmentRealtor.com.   This results in the placement of  RenoInvestmentRealtor.com as the number one site in Google under “Reno Hotels for Sale” (Appendix 1).  Searching in Google for “University Housing for Sale,” RenoInvestmentRealtor is number two.  Testing with Google for results is a baseline to determine the effectiveness of the Search Engine Marketing program.

eWebcounter   (www.ewebcounter.com) provides  numerical processing for the Search Engine Marketing validation.  In the example of RenoInvestmentRealtor, the basic graph for the last 30 days:

Charts present numerical series in a graphical format.   Charting software offers the researcher the opportunity to make assumptions about the data set.  More important is the reference set, which websites sent traffic to the site of interest.   

This gives the researcher the ability to track every reference and build a model on which advertisements are effective.  Writing real estate advertising copy is not rocket science, it is emotional.  Emotional marketing is the weakest form of marketing, but the most effective.  Hawkins, Best, and Coney (p565) argue that "Hanes Corporation suffered substantial losses ($30 million) on its L'erin cosmetics line when, in response to consumer interviews; it positioned it as a functional rather than a romantic or emotional product."   Presidential speeches that are logical and persuasive, but an emotional speech is the most effective. 

In Hawkins, Best, and Coney in Consumer Behavior, Building Marketing Stategy, "external information search is skewed toward limited search, with the greatest proportion of consumers performing little external search immediately prior to purchase." (page 537).   Searching in Google is passive, structured on the language of query.  Hawkins, Best, and Coney go on to state: . . . "27 percent of the purchases of major appliances considered only one brand" (p537).  This could  be extrapolated to real estate with the notion that 1/3 of individuals researching real estate purchases will concentrate on one local school where the perception that education is superior in that school.  This can be referred to as Attribute-based choice, according to Hawkins, Best, and Coney (p.561) "knowledge of specific attributes at the time the choice is made. . ."

 

Search Engine Marketing fuels buyer behavior and decision making behavior.  Google .com and Yahoo.com are the ultimate attribute-based selection filter.   These search engines expand the nature of bounded rationality.  Early marketing research strategies such as monitoring chat rooms, social networking blogs have led to artificial intelligence searches such as GoodKeyWords.Com.

References:

Hawkins, Del I, Best Roger, Corney, Kenneth (2004). Consumer Behavior: Building Marketing Strategy,  McGraw Hill/Irwin, New York.