Agencies and Brands Are Using Search Intelligence for a Competitive Advantage

Search Engines have become a central part of marketing, research, shopping, learning, and much more. More people are engaging and visiting search engines daily for various kinds of activities. A recent Google study shows 92.6% of the market share dominating the search engine market around the world while 87.7% of the market share in the US as of December 2022.

With such a massive market share, you will find every large, medium, and small company along with a startup using Search Engine platforms as a primary source of their marketing, lead generation, brand awareness, lead conversions, sales, and more.

The competitiveness in Search engines is vast and varies from organic to paid ad campaigns. The data, insights, and reports from these Search engines are rigid, insufficient, and rarely beneficial in the long run. Therefore, the need for holistic and granular data is integral to dominating the market in any part of the globe. And, the concept of Search Intelligence was brought up for that exact reason! There was a significant requirement to go beyond the data, analysis, and insights offered by search engines, marketplaces, and other sources in order to enhance market share, boost search performance and ultimately increase sales.

In this article, we are going to learn about Search Intelligence software, learn about its components, and how it will help marketing professionals across brands, retailers, and agencies.

Search Intelligence or Search Marketing Intelligence is an emerging concept of tracking/monitoring end-to-end SERP data. Tools that enable this help marketers analyze SERP data and build holistic search strategy to optimize their paid ads and organic listings to maximize total search performance.

With this, marketers will have a better understanding of the competitors, SERP layout, and paid search landscape. Additionally, these insights will help create a better strategy to gain a competitive edge. Moreover, tracking, monitoring search dynamics (local, global), analyzing ad formats, keeping up with the SERP landscape, and optimizing search budgets across SEO & SEM teams will be very easy.

Here are the three major components –

We know that Search is extremely competitive. With this, SERP analysis is going to play a key role in search campaigns in today’s industry. Having a broad perspective on your SERP as well as understanding the tactics to stack against your competitors is an important skill set. In addition to a holistic search insight with a detailed view of the competitive landscape, Search Marketing Intelligence will also provide ad cannibalization issues, SERP fluctuations, and market share of voice.

To name a few, the holistic insights enable you to audit your search marketing performance, giving you the ability to choose the right strategies. You will also gain knowledge of your competitors and get real-time paid ads coverage, and more. Furthermore, the platform will help make informed decisions about your search marketing efforts maximizing your search campaigns’ visibility and  CTR leading to a high ROAS.

Here is a  Holistic Search Insight for SERP Features Trends in the US. – SERP Features Trends for Apparel & Accessories Marketing

Understanding paid search dynamics is very critical for SEM professionals, and if done correctly can make a huge impact in Paid Advertising campaigns. While advertising platforms do provide an analytical report, however, solely using them is not sufficient to get a clear picture of other factors making an impact on the paid search campaigns.

With Paid Search Intelligence as a subcomponent of Search Intelligence, marketers and brands can get holistic paid ads insight. Unlike the auction reports from Google and Bing, these insights about  SERP volatility, true ad positions, competitive landscape, and shopper attributes, you gain a competitive edge on the factors that affect your paid ads campaigns Such holistic insights will help you in making data-driven decisions and improvements.

Paid Search intelligence can help with

• Paid Ads Trends, & Fluctuations
• Monitor and Measure Online Share of Voice (By Geography, search devices, paid search features)
• Visibility into Marketing 4Ps of Emerging Competitors
• Provide opportunities to win more market shares
• Data-driven Budget Mobilization tactics
• Insights into eCommerce Shopper’s Journey
• Insights into Google Shopping Ad Extensions, Annotations & Labels

Paid Search Intelligence provides insights and real-time data on various types of ads.

• Google Shopping Ads
  1. Ad Extensions
  2. Annotations
  3. Label
• Text Ads
• Display Ads
• Local Ads

Learn more about Paid Search Intelligence Software

Here are two Paid Search Intelligence case studies helping with maximizing CTR, and budget mobilization.

1. Retailer Increase revenue by 20% with holistic search insights
   • 20% increase in Revenue
   • $55K Ad Budget to reallocate
2. Health Beauty Brand
   • Increase Clicks by 20%
   • 33% Reduction in Ad Spend
   • $52K Estimated Savings to Reallocate

Read more about Ad Intelligence and how it can boost Ad Performance

With SEO Intelligence (another sub-component of Search marketing intelligence), SEO Directors and Managers can easily understand organic SERP layouts, SERP features fluctuations (such as People Also Ask, Featured Snippets) and other trends impacting your organic performance This is only possible with real-time search monitoring data and granular insights on all SERP formats across the competitive landscape.

SEO intelligence helps monitor your client’s performance with competitive metrics. Some of the unique insights provide by SEO intelligence are:

• Share of Search: Monitor Your Client and their Competitor’s Brand Popularity
• Above-the-Fold Coverage: Understand Total Coverage in SERP Estate
• True Ad Rank: Track accurate organic position in SERP
• Click Share: Analyze Competitor Click Shares in your client’s keyword landscape

These professionals can easily monitor SERP layouts by

• Keyword intent
• Geo-location
• Device
• Keyword strength, volume
• Customized Category

These factors can make a substantial impact on your organic campaigns, click shares, the share of search, and lead flow. Aside from SERP layout, SEO marketers can also utilize SEO Intelligence data to identify keywords to target and categorize the keywords for SEO or SEM teams. Furthermore, insights into striking distance keywords, budget optimize keywords and keyword gapping insights can help you close the gaps with the competitors.

Learn More: SEO Intelligence Software

Here,  this case study showcases the power of SEO Intelligence and how it maximizes  CTR, click share, and google share of voice.

1. B2B Company
   1. 212% Growth in Share of Clicks
   2. 192% Growth of the Keyword Universe
   3. 244% Growth in Google Share of Voice

Before proceeding to the next topic of Key metrics by Search Intelligence you may want to learn more about the insights provided by Search Intelligence, and how it helps increase holistic search visibility in SERP. Please read our article on Holistic Search Explorer.

While search engines like Google, Bing, and Baidu provide their metrics, they do not provide a complete picture of the factors affecting their organic and paid search campaigns. Tools such as Search Marketing Intelligence offer innovative search data analytics and unique search metrics which are missing on SEO/SEM tools and other search engine insights platforms.

1. Share of Search
2. True Ad Rank
3. Above the Fold/Below the Fold Coverage
4. Inbound Share of Voice
5. Click Share

To get more detailed insights on these metrics, click here: Top 5 Search Metrics for Managers

The SEO/SEM tools available in the market can only be beneficial to Search/SEO marketers. However,  various teams in agencies and brands benefit from Search Intelligence. Here, we will analyze how different teams can utilize Search intelligence to meet their targeted goals.

Let’s start with Agencies

The Business Development team is primarily responsible for winning new businesses, growth of an existing client’s business, and finding opportunities for new market entry. Currently, with existing tools, it will only give you limited data and insights.  And that’s where Search Intelligence will play a  huge role. With customizable search monitoring in real-time as per your needs, you can monitor the entire competitive landscape.

Here are a few use cases of Search Intelligence that the Business Development team can use

1. Data-Driven sales opportunity reports winning new business
2. Holistic Data across markets (geographical & channels)
3. Grow your client’s total performance with promotional, product experience, and pricing analytics.
4. Create a holistic strategy to maximize ROAS.
5. Spot gaps by geographies, categories, products, channels, and customized categorization.
6. Capitalize on competitive gaps and shopper trends to upsell your client’s business.
7. Insightful reports showing top & emerging competitors,

Learn More about Winning New Business with Holistic Search Insights

Strategic Planning Team is responsible for reviewing organizations and finding out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Additionally, they are also responsible for finding new strategies and innovative ideas to boost Agency clients’ performance on digital platforms.

Search Intelligence can provide holistic data to understand both the market and its competitive landscape. Moreover, they also provide platforms for granular SWOT analysis.

Here are the few benefits, strategic planning teams can foster by using Search Intelligence

• Holistic Data across the shopper journey to understand the market landscape
• actionable insights to build strategies to increase sales, ROAS, organic clicks, and conversions.
• Insights to understand the SERP landscape for new market entry

Learn More about Marketing Strategic Insights to Boost Performance

What Search Intelligence provides helps the Data Analytical team save lots of analyst hours & time.

• Save lots of their analyst hours & time.
• SERP, Retail Pricing, Product Experience Data
• Multi-Segmented Analytics
• Advertising, Merchandising Dynamics, Digital Shelf Data
• Marketing 4P insights data
• Competitor Data
• Data delivery into BI tools like Data Studio, Quick Insights, BI, Tableau, etc.
• Actionable Insights in Data Studio Dashboard Reports.

Learn More about Data Technology to drive agency innovation

In an Advertising agency, in addition to building a good client relationship, the account team is also responsible for making sure their client’s needs are fulfilled as well as giving an updated report per their feedback. Therefore, the team needs to be cognizant of the client’s needs and their performance- mainly their KPIs ROAS, ROIs, etc.

Search intelligence provides all-in-one holistic search insights that help the account department team stay on top of their client’s business search performance, budget mobilization, and client reports.

Learn More: Insights & Analytics for Account Management

The Marketing Team’s core responsibility is the client’s brand awareness. This is attained with various marketing campaigns such as organic, paid, content, videos, email, and such. There are many tools in the market dedicated to the marketing team, however, they provide limited and unactionable insights.

With Search Intelligence, the team can benefit in many ways

1. Data Drive insights for their organic & paid campaigns.
2. Market Pulse report to understand the SERP landscape in different categories.
3. Real-time SERP data to understand and create a content development strategy.
4. SOV trends across targeted locations & product categories.
5. Holistic Data to mobile and optimize search budget for paid campaigns.

If you are looking to evaluate your brand’s position in the marketplace, its strength and weakness, and its SERP then – Search intelligence is the perfect tool!

Here are different ways, Search intelligence help enhance your brands.

• SWOT analysis – Gauge your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Search Marketing Performance Audit – Discover the right marketing efforts with your ROI, and share of voice in the industry.
• Holistic View of Market Landscape – Visualize across countries, cities, devices, search intent, and historical SERP fluctuation
• Find & Evaluate Competitors – Get granular SERP data to understand top and emerging competitors, build a strategy to get a competitive edge against them, and increase market share.
• Product Experience Audit – Evaluate and compare competitor’s product features, prices, reviews, offers & promotions and build data-driven strategies.
• Brand Protection – Protect your Brand Value churn from MAP violation, get alerts of the violation and enforce them.

In sum, to compete in today’s market, just using the insights and auction reports provided by search engine platforms is not enough. It will be incredibly challenging. Therefore, to stay ahead of the game from winning new businesses to boosting search marketing performance, it is imperative for platforms like Search Intelligence.

Search Intelligence is the solution that can help Agencies and Brands save time and budget and provide granular insights into organic, local, global, text ads, and google shopping ads campaigns to drive higher ROI.