What does Acquisition mean in Search Marketing?

When using the term “Acquisition” in search engine marketing, typically it relates to the actions and sign-up, purchase, or contact events collected to identify prospective customers. Ideally, there are connections between the internet and reaching out to customers for qualifying these events into a CRM or customer database that are measured against goals in the user journey.

Understanding how people search for a particular product or service, the “user intent” is often linked to one of the four types of keyword intent. These include the Navigational, Commercial, Informational & Transactional keywords commonly used to reach a specific goal or function. In Search Marketing, the type of keyword intent measured as well as the actions taken on a page can be used to define the successful alignment of user intent.

There are many different audience report categories to map when, where, and how an Acquisition event took place. This can help build processes for qualifying customer intent and saving time for the business. The acquisition features of Google Analytics help reveal where your visitors originated from such as social networks, search engine marketing, or other referral traffic. Some of these categories include Demographics, Interests, Cross-Device, Technology & Geographic location.

The Google Analytics Acquisition Overview report (whew, long one) is a great way to measure the performance of traffic using conversion, behavioural, and the Acquisition-Behaviour-Conversion (ABC) cycle. This information is vital when calculating the value per lead, lifetime value of a customer, etc across multiple marketing channels.

Comparing traffic sources such as Social, Direct, E-Mail, Organic & Paid Search, Referral & Other Advertising to see which are generating users that convert into customers.

So what does Acquisition mean in Digital Marketing?

Typically it is the measurement of the traffic source, medium, and conversion data to compare user behaviours tailored for a specific action or event, such as signing up for a service or purchasing a product. For more information on User Flows in Google Analytics, or learn more about the acquisition process by reading more of our eCommerce web design faq.