Google saves lives!
by Dave Ivy
We all know Google has gone beyond Search - Mapping, office applications, shops and a plethora of other online inventions are making Google more powerful than Microsoft. This article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/12/google-health - highlights that in a test run in nine US states, Google predicted flu epidemics up to two weeks before the Federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention spotted an outbreak. Nobody knows exactly how many lives might be saved but as they say, prevention is better than cure and a virus can spread very fast in two weeks.
It got me thinking about how else Search might better be used to market on a site. Already, we've built sites that personalise page names based on search referrers and alter landing pages to suit the search terms but what else could we do? How about improving the user journey to 'strip out' non-related items...?
Here's an example: I'm looking to buy a digital camera so I type my search term into Google and then pick a retailer from the results (type 'cough' in and you get refinement options in Google so in this example, one of the options might be 'retailers'). The site then loads and is fully customised with digital cameras, stripping out all the non-relevant stuff such as washing machines, TVs and the rest of the inventory that doesn't interest me at this time. All the offers are cameras or related accessories and my journey through the site feels less crowded and less buried within the sites structure. It feels more like I'm at a specialist - someone like Jessops. All the menu options make sense straight away ('portable technology' as a heading on the Comet site makes sense to me but possibly not to my Auntie Ruth who is just expecting to see 'cameras') and I can choose from cameras, camera accessories, photo frames - whatever is actually relevant to my search. Obviously some cross-sell opportunity is lost but a tab can still be present at the top, something like 'see all departments'.
A quick play on Amazon shows they're already doing this to some extent, hiding lots of the navigation in deep-linked pages to keep the user journey clean but it'd be great to see this on more sites.
We all know Google has gone beyond Search - Mapping, office applications, shops and a plethora of other online inventions are making Google more powerful than Microsoft. This article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/12/google-health - highlights that in a test run in nine US states, Google predicted flu epidemics up to two weeks before the Federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention spotted an outbreak. Nobody knows exactly how many lives might be saved but as they say, prevention is better than cure and a virus can spread very fast in two weeks.
It got me thinking about how else Search might better be used to market on a site. Already, we've built sites that personalise page names based on search referrers and alter landing pages to suit the search terms but what else could we do? How about improving the user journey to 'strip out' non-related items...?
Here's an example: I'm looking to buy a digital camera so I type my search term into Google and then pick a retailer from the results (type 'cough' in and you get refinement options in Google so in this example, one of the options might be 'retailers'). The site then loads and is fully customised with digital cameras, stripping out all the non-relevant stuff such as washing machines, TVs and the rest of the inventory that doesn't interest me at this time. All the offers are cameras or related accessories and my journey through the site feels less crowded and less buried within the sites structure. It feels more like I'm at a specialist - someone like Jessops. All the menu options make sense straight away ('portable technology' as a heading on the Comet site makes sense to me but possibly not to my Auntie Ruth who is just expecting to see 'cameras') and I can choose from cameras, camera accessories, photo frames - whatever is actually relevant to my search. Obviously some cross-sell opportunity is lost but a tab can still be present at the top, something like 'see all departments'.
A quick play on Amazon shows they're already doing this to some extent, hiding lots of the navigation in deep-linked pages to keep the user journey clean but it'd be great to see this on more sites.
Labels: digital marketing, personalisation
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