Understanding Search Intent

Why do we search? What motivates us to fire up Google and start entering search terms? There are lots of reasons. We may be researching a future purchase, or just educating ourselves. We may be on a path of discovery, searching for new things to do, or places to go. Heck, we might just be looking up the lyrics to song we just heard. Or, if you're me, we may just be checking our spelling (Google is a very friendly spell checker--they politely ask "Did you mean: Hawaiian?" when you enter your best guess).

Because we search for so many reasons, even the most relevant, contextual ads are not always effective. They'll never be effective as long as we search without intent to buy.

Any search, whose goal is to merely research, learn, or figure out how to spell "Hawaiian" has no intent to buy anything. Contextual ads with offers for cheap hotels or package flights will always go unclicked without intent.

For search results to be be effective (and search ads too), they must have context, but searcher intent is also essential.

Gleaning a searcher's intent is extremely important to search engines. And not just to improve ad performance. Understanding intent can improve organic search results too. Take this example from another past newsletter:

"It's amazing what we expect from search engines. We enter a word or two and expect to find exactly what we're looking for. Imagine talking to a librarian this way. I can just picture the perplexed expression on a librarian's face if I were to walk up and just say 'records.' Would he point me to the music collection? Would he assume I was looking for the card catalog? He would probably have to ask some clarifying questions. 'I'm sorry sir, what kind of records are you looking for - Jazz, Rock, Bluegrass?'

I'd restate my request, 'making records.'

Still puzzled he'd say, 'Hum, well we have some accounting books that have good ideas about keeping your files in order...'

'How to set records,' I interrupt.

'Are you looking for the Guinness Book of World Records, or sports related records?' he might ask.

'How to set records in a database,' I'd clarify.

'Oh, those kinds of records,' he'd say with relief, 'the computer books are over there but there are a lot of them. What kind of databases are you interested in?'

We would never presume that a librarian would understand vague ambiguous requests. Yet we often throw such words and phrases into search engines with little clarification. All a search engine has to go on is the words we give it. And it doesn't even have the opportunity to ask clarifying questions. No matter how abstract or unclear our request, the search engine has to respond with something.

But if the engine had a little more information to go on, beyond just the words we give it, it might be able to provide better results. For example, if, while I approached our bewildered librarian to ask for 'records,' I was wearing a U2 T-shirt, and was listening to music on an MP3 player he might glean that I'm looking for record albums. Likewise, if I were whacking a paddle ball game while balancing a chair on my nose he might conclude that I was interested in setting a word record. Or, if I had thick black glasses, a pocket protector, and a laptop under my arm he might guess I was looking for information about database records.

Unfortunately, search engines don't have any of this auxiliary information available to them. That is, unless we give it to them."

Search and search advertising require context - it's foundational. But context alone does not usually result in a click, a conversion or a sale, because context alone doesn't take into consideration why a person is searching.

And search engines like Google are actively trying to improve their ability to glean intent. In fact, one way they are trying to do this is by storing our past search requests. They use this past search history to learn about us as individuals. I wrote about this in our newsletter Number One in Google? Not for long! If they can understand our personal profiles, they can guess better at our intent and improve their results. Intent makes a huge difference.

And that's why AdWords, when displayed on search results pages perform better than AdSense ads displayed on contextual publisher content sites. Search engines have a much better chance of presuming intent.

We don't usually first go to a newspaper site or blog in order to establish our travel plans. In those places ads are incidental to our activity. But we often go to search engines with such intent. And when you combine context with intent you have a very powerful combination. Matching context and intent is rare. But it occurs most often in the context of search.   next >