Want to know how consumers search in _____?
TL;DR -- Tell us what category we should research next.
TL;DR
Tell us what category we should research next.
Near Media specializes in helping companies understand how consumers use Google to find businesses like theirs. We want to make our research more affordable to more people, so we’re seeing which subscribers might want to team up and split the cost of a single category multiple ways.
Typical insights our research provides:
- What percentage of consumers choose a business from an ad vs. an organic result vs. a Google Business Profile?
- What directories matter most?
- Where are clicked and chosen businesses ranked?
- What do selected businesses have in common?
- Why do consumers choose a business—what messaging and positioning resonates most?
Here’s a typical example of our research output from the Hotels vertical.
Backstory
For the past 18 months, Near Media has helped clients and trade groups understand how consumers in specific verticals search Google, evaluate the results, and choose businesses from those results.
We’re basically user-testing Google search results, category by category.
We’ve watched and listened to over 1300 videos of searcher journeys, and while we’ve seen some consistent decision-making patterns, mostly we’ve been struck by how different consumer behavior is in each category.
We’ve also been struck by how much behavior differs from conventional wisdom based on horizontal search queries or out-of-date clickthrough rate hypotheses.
It’s not a cheap undertaking, and while the data that comes back from our studies has been immensely valuable to clients, it’s not an obvious line item in most companies’ marketing budgets, or even SEO budgets.
We want to make our research more affordable to more people, so we’re seeing if newsletter subscribers whose businesses or clients’ businesses are in the same category might want to team up and split the costs of our research into that category multiple ways.
Why behavioral research is so important
Google is only sharing data about the clicks you receive — but what about all the clicks you’re missing out on?
- Where should you be trying to compete?
- What review, rating, or distance thresholds do selected companies exceed in your category?
- How should you be talking about your products, services, or company as a whole?
We’ve seen substantial differences in how consumers choose businesses from category to category across legal, healthcare, storage, restaurant, travel, and home services verticals.
If you want to know how consumers search in YOUR category, please let us know by taking our brief 5-question survey here
And even if you don’t take the survey, if you’ve got any comments, feedback, or suggestions on what we’re doing, we’d love to hear.
Thanks for being a subscriber!
David, Mike, and Greg