Leveraging search via search engine optimization (SEO) or keyword advertising (SEM) is all about connecting your business with potential customers that have expressed an interest in your product, service, or content via keywords in a search.
Therefore, these searches are direct and explicit expressions by real people. As such, targeted keyword search is a very effective pull marketing strategy.
Data-Driven Search Personas Can Enhance Your SEO Performance
User segmentation is the practice of dividing potential or existing users into groups that share similar characteristics. As such, user segments go hand in hand with data-driven personas!
User segmentation is employed as a user understanding technique by nearly every product team. Think of it this way! The ultimate goal of product design or product strategy for that matter is to create products/services that:
are aimed at understanding user needs and pain points as best as possible,
have essential features to solve the users’ primary needs as best as possible.
In order to be able to identify user needs and pain points and serve them well, it is essential to have a good understanding of your user/customer base. Both user segmentation and data-driven personas can aid in this understanding.
As paper-based personas move to interactive persona analytics systems, online companies face large user populations, making segmentation a daunting exercise, along with creating actionable data-driven personas from these large datasets.
In this research, we demonstrate an approach that facilitates user segmentation. The approach leverages product dissemination and product impact metrics with normalized Shannon entropy.
Example of an APG Persona – from numbers to persona in a matter of hours! Or less!
To continue with our discussion from Personas with Segment Analytics (Part 1), to perform a persona inspired segmentation using your web analytics tool (here we are using Google Analytics for our platform as an example), these are some details about your customers you would need to gather which will be later used to create personas:
Age and Gender: You can see the breakdown of your audience by their ages if you navigate to Audience>Demographics>Overview
We will use the age group with largest demographics to make our 1st persona. For more information about this group. We shall find affinities of this user group.
Affinity: For this we will expand Age > Secondary Dimension, Within Secondary dimension, type “Affinity”.
Now you can see the categories associated to your 1st personas age group and gender. Google Analytics uses different types of factors such as browsing history, time on page, and then associates this with a ready-made user profile (i.e. ‘shoppers’, ‘technophiles’, ‘foodies’, ‘music lovers’). Note down a few of the top affinities.
In-Market: This helps us to know what kind of products your audience actively compares and researches. For this, within Secondary dimension, type “In-Market Segment”.
Note Down a few of the top products.
Location: If you navigate to Audience>Geo>Location. You can find out the countries your 1st person likely belongs to.
Device Used: By clicking Audience>Mobile>Devices, you can see exactly which brand of mobile they’re using and even what service provider or operating system they prefer.
The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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Web analytics is the collecting and analysis of data for optimizing an online process.
Segmentation. or segment analytics, is an approach of dividing customers into groups based on different characteristics. The resulting segments are composed of consumers who will respond similarly to marketing strategies and who share traits, such as similar interests, needs, or locations. During the remarketing, for instance, you can target specific customers with the help of these segments.
For example, your total website traffic can be segmented as:
customers who purchased your products,
customers who only visited your website,
customers who bounced from your homepage.
Using segment analytics, you can create meaningful and accurate personas representing each of these customer segments.
Using segment analytics, you can create meaningful and accurate personas representing each of these customer segments.
We discuss using personas with segment analytics here, and a later blog post, Personas with Segment Analytics (Part 2), we will discuss how to create personas using Google Analytics segmenting feature.
The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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A/B Testing Personas: Using Data-Driven Personas for A/B Testing
Once we have created a data-driven personas using the persona creation process, we can then test to determine which of these personas give us better results. We can analyze these results and decide which of our personas should be given more importance while making decisions for design, product improvement, online advertising, design use cases, etc. This is where A/B test comes in handy.
What is A/B testing?
In simple terms. A/B testing is comparing the results of two plans, courses of action, ads, interfaces, or whatever. A/B testing is a user experience research methodology generally used by e-commerce companies to increase their open click rates/site traffic by conducting experiments and making changes based on the outcome of the test.
A/B Testing Personas: Using Data-Driven Personas for A/B Testing
The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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SEO Personas: How to implement persona-driven search engine optimization (SEO) for a website, Part 2 by Jaad Mohammed. (Read Part 1.)
In this blog post, we discuss persona-driven search engine optimization (SEO) or SEO personas.
For this, we need to first create personas for your website, service, or product. This can be done following the steps mentioned in this article, How to create a persona?
Once we have our persona profiles that look something like this one from APG, a data-driven persona system, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: This is one example of a persona profile that one can use for SEO