Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

The Path of Indirection

In The Customer Life Cycle, I suggested a pretty straightforward approach to getting and converting customers. But sometimes, if you look in your heart, the best—and most cost-effective—path is one of indirection. This is most often the case when the customer is unable, or unwilling, to directly enter search terms that describe their desired goal.

An example I like to use concerns someone who is a likely prospect for a dating site. But this person doesn’t search for matchmaking sites. Rather, she might search for old Meg Ryan movies such as Sleepless in Seattle. So a path-of-indirection AdWords campaign for a matchmaking site might target searches for these romantic movies.

The trick here is that you have to essentially read the customer’s mind, and know what they want better than they know themselves. It is easy to get this wrong.

AdWords campaigns that use indirection often don’t work. In fact, they should only be used in very specific situations, and monitored carefully for effectiveness. But when they do work, they can lead to surprisingly high conversion rates and be extremely cost-effective.