OM Ideas: The importance of clickstream data for Search Marketing

October 01, 2018 in Online Marketing Ideas

If you follow me on Facebook, you might know that from time to time I share my thoughts about the online marketing industry.

I always did that on social media, but I realised that it makes also sense to publish them on my blog, where every day hundreds of visitors read what I have to say about this fantastic world.

That’s why from now on you’ll find here a section called “OM ideas” where you’ll find short blog post, I hope you’ll find them interesting and they’ll help you to better understand how the digital industry is evolving.

Keyword Planner vs Clickstream Data

As you probably know, the Keyword Planner is getting more and more inaccurate because Google is hiding the actual data. This is really bad, especially if you are investing time and resources in Search Marketing (SEO & SEM).

As you can see below, I have a page that is ranking in the first positions of the SERPs, you could think that I reached my goal. Well, not really, because the CTR is extremely low (non-existing for some queries) and I’m not bringing users to the website.

Why is this happening?

The answer is simple – YouTube and Google Images are getting all the clicks. The page is well positioned on a SERP similar to the one you see below, where basically Google Images and YouTube are in the first positions and ranking with a website is useless.

That’s why I think it’s important to don’t use the Google Keyword Planner but tools that are based on clickstream data (e.g. SEMrush and Ahrefs) where you can actually see the real search volume and, most important thing, the actual CTR of the 1st position (they can do that because they anonymously track and collect data about the user behviours e.g. searches, pageviews, time on site,…).

My advise is to use clickstream data for your keywords research and than manually check the important SERPs and figure out which kind of content you should produce in order to be visible and generate clicks (e.g. in my case, a YouTube video).

If you want to know more about this topic you should read this post.

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