User intention: enhancing the digital campaign with user factors

We thank our readers for their attention to our yesterday’s publication on behavioral factors and their analysis by the search engine itself. Your voices are important to us as an assessment of our work and feedback is important to us. Thank! Today, let's look at the same behavioral factors from the opposite side: how can a marketer conduct research and plan the creation of more successful websites using data on behavioral factors? The author speaks about the concept of "Person" and refers us to a number of publications describing the algorithms of working with the PF for a marketer. At the end of the article, we suggest that you select the next article that you would like to see in our blog in translation. As always, we are grateful to the analytical department of the ALTWeb Group and the SERPClick team for their assistance in translating.


Effective digital platforms make efforts to manage user behavior and get the desired return from it. In this they are helped by data on user behavior. This data, in turn, allows you to improve the site with the help of adaptive changes that will attract even more users.

User factors, of course, are directly related to the user's intent. You can understand what type of person your client is through the lens of his actions: this data will allow you to predict the route that your client will most likely make through your website.
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Specialists in both optimization and digital campaigns are familiar with the ability to find out the user's intent based on search marketing data. They try to anticipate and classify intentions that are indirectly derived from keywords, typing that the user has entered the site. Thus, a specialist can find more more accurate keywords that will lead users to convert to leads and sales. However, while user intent and search go hand in hand, search engine experts need to look more closely at intent if we all want to get the full benefit of our campaigns.

Behavioral factors

"Persona" was a buzzword for a long time (when it came to foreign marketing, not with us - approx. Trans.), When it came to defining the user's intention.

The word refers to some type of person or group of people who have important similarities. By grouping cohorts of people with similar attributes, we can begin to set certain patterns and become a little closer to being able to anticipate consumer and other types of intentions. Then, we can position products for certain groups of customers in a more targeted manner.


The classification and segmentation of users is an extremely useful and important type of activity of search marketers. For example, it is important to bear in mind that the broader the search query, the less the intention to buy something from the user who came through it. The shoe seller may have to make a choice - whether or not he needs the keyword “shoes”. From a brand or traffic point of view, this is a potentially useful keyword. However, short keywords of this type are usually not only expensive, but also do not represent the intention to buy. On the contrary, the user who came to the short keyword is engaged in research and search for information.

In this case, the intention to buy would be higher when using the keyword "knee-high military boots with buckles and buckles". In this case, the chances that a person is looking for them to buy are really high. Jason Hawkins speaks more about portraits of users or persons in this post SEMrush (which we will most likely translate for you later - approx. Transl.). In his post, he stresses that users who collect information compare products - and first of all it is important to note that they compare products that they want to buy.

Data retrieval tools

The main commandments of the definition of a user's portrait were discussed in sufficient detail in the article “ User Portraits in Search: How to Work with an Optimization Targeting the User ”, which appeared in Search Engine Watch. I highly recommend this article for those I would like to improve my work on optimization, explore the intention of users. At the end of the article it is mentioned that the greatest difficulty is the collection of data. The data is indeed a fundamental tool for the optimizer and the marketer, but to collect it in the “Not Provided” era (“not specified” is a term for marketing milestones, when Google refused to provide search queries for the site directly to GA and the difficulties that followed for the optimizers - comment transl.) However, do we have the opportunity to explore user behavior in some other way and enrich our search strategy?

Matthew Butler, Ph.D., working for iPerceptions expressed this opinion in a recent press release : “Two fundamental problems in data collection in researching user behavior are accurate data collection and the ability to respond [to changes in user behavior] in real time” . Matthew heads the team that developed the Internet Recognition System, which solves the problem of creating a personal user environment in real time. According to him, this solution uses "15 million standardized units of user data."

In one of his recent posts , Avinash Kaushik talks in some detail about how to get the most out of using the data to which we can have access. In addition to the traditional tools of the optimizer, it offers a method of working with keywords with more efficient use of the Google Webmaster Tools tool, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends tool. It is interesting to note that at the end of his post he considers the future possibilities of analysis tools and describes some tool of Personal Page Analysis, which he himself apparently gave the name to. In his case, the identity of the user that the page should reflect comes to the fore.

When User Segmentation was added to GA last year as one of the capabilities of the system, we were able to see various user personalities or behavioral patterns in our target audience. And then it became clear: effective analysis and marketing are movements towards a personalized user experience.

Persons, cohorts and user segmentation are exactly what we need for this. The same person can be described by different Persons, and the intentions of these people will vary depending on the circumstances. Someone may behave in a certain way on your website on your day off, while the next day the behavior will change for any arbitrary reasons, for example, because he or she is late for school to pick up the children in the evening. The most effective campaigns will operate not only with one Person, trying to bring content to the needs of a living person in real conditions.

What conclusions can be made for search engines?

While the tools for working with keywords still remain very useful in creating new useful pages and generating natural search traffic on them, we still do not know the exact patterns between the search query and user behavior. However, if we pay more attention to analyzing user behavior, we can not only create responsive web pages that satisfy the user's intention in the form we were able to determine, but we can also use this information to create more successful marketing strategies.

Potentially, we can expand the list of our queries and keywords and predict which particular queries will be especially useful to us, based on correctly collected data. If we can determine the relationship between the request and the type of user coming through it, we can better understand which marketing tools to use.

List of articles to vote
Search Query Analysis Method to Increase Conversions and Sales, SEMrush, Jason Hawkins
User-driven promotion, Search Engine Watch, Guillaume Bouchard
Ways to Solve the Problem Not Provided, Avinash Kaushik
New approach to user segmentation in GA, Tom Craver