Effect of Personalized Search on Digital Marketing

If you begin to type a query into the Google search box, you may sometimes be surprised at what you could find.

Why do... cats purr?
What is there...after death?
Where can I.get free ebooks?
How much does...an iPad cost?

Since 2004, when 'Google Suggest' became a default feature of the search engine, searchers received a handy list of options to help them autocomplete their queries. Now known as 'Autocomplete', this feature helped us finish our sentences, enhancing our search experience considerably.

Over the years, as personalized search has become more complex, the display of these same suggestions makes digital marketing professionals ask the question, 'Just how proficient has Google become in predicting the needs of searchers?'

If you think about it carefully, it is not that great. While most searchers would find it a bit spooky to see search suggestions that accurately mirror their thoughts, we can take comfort from the fact that our thinking process is continuously changing according to the inputs we receive from our environment. Even if Google had recorded all our past queries, it would still be impossible for them to predict what our future queries would be.

However, if search engines could predict search results better, there would be a sensational digital marketing opportunity just waiting to be explored. According to the Pew 'Internet and American Life Project', a leading digital marketing research agency, about 82 percent of traffic on the web, begins on a search engine. Does this mean that a massive majority of opportunities for digital marketing specialists lie in online search?

Hardly. The main problem about search behaviour is that it is rarely as neutral as digital marketing specialists would want it to be.

There is way too much information about searcher motivation, which is lost in the milliseconds during which a typical key phrase is typed out. Nevertheless, there is one crystal-clear digital marketing metric that helps one get to the bottom of this matter. This metric is the length of the search query.

In 2003, a group of researchers from Rutgers University published a report named, 'Query Length in Interactive Information Retrieval'. This report studied the relationship between query length and search efficiency, in online search engines. The researchers discovered that there was a positive correlation between search query length, and user satisfaction over search result quality. This means that the more words people typed into a search engine to phrase their queries, the more pleased they were about the results. Indicative of the sophisticated evolution displayed by searchers while gathering information, this study saw the need for tailoring digital marketing campaigns accordingly.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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