In a recent article published by Google, personalized search continues to become more prominent as people increasingly turn to search engines for personal advice and recommendations. Check out our blog post about how the rise in voice search plays an important role in this. It’s a shift in how people are searching to find answers to things they’ve been searching for all along as opposed to the emergence of new queries. The inclusion of “…for me” in searches has grown 60% over the past two years.
Instead of searching for ‘Chicken breast recipes’, we see a shift towards, ‘What can I make with chicken breast?’. Rather than searching for ‘BMW repairs in Fort Worth’, we see ‘BMW repairs near me.” Instead of “best car insurance”, we’re seeing a rise in “best car insurance for me.” Users expect their search engines to know who they are to the extent that recommendations/results are appropriately curated for them.
As users grow their relationships with their search engines, so must our search campaigns be structured to capture these types of searches and deliver the personalized results users are looking for. Keyword sets must become even more granular, ad copy must become more personal, and landing pages need to provide even more personalized content. As marketers, we need to understand who the “me” is in each search and ensure we’re segmenting audiences appropriately rather than relying on the query to include keywords that indicate who the user is. For example, it’s easy to differentiate the people behind the searches of “best vets for cattle in Fort Worth” and “best vets for dogs in Chicago,” and equally as easy to ensure search programs are structured to be most relevant to each query. It’s a bit harder to tell the difference between the different people both searching for “best vets near me” in order to understand which ad each user should be served and which landing page experience is best.
As personal assistants continue to seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, users are now expecting more personalization than ever before. Much of the responsibility for hyper personalization will be AI driven within search programs, but there is still a need for strategic planning, execution, and optimization on the digital teams behind them.