Learn how Google’s new AdWords Search Funnels can make a huge bottom-line difference on your paid search campaign.

Knowledge is power, and with Google’s recently announced search funnels, paid search marketers just became a lot more powerful.

The new feature, which is being integrated into Google AdWords over the next few weeks, promises to offer marketers a wealth of new information about customer purchasing decisions with which to analyze and use to better craft their paid search campaigns.

Up until now, AdWords told you the keywords that directly resulted in a sale but nothing more. What remained a mystery was all of the impressions and clicks that your customer made before finally deciding on your product.

With Search Funnels, you’ll finally see the whole picture. Each step in your customer’s buying process is carefully laid out in the 7 new reports for examination and action.

Let’s run through an example of how this might look.

Step 1: Fred types keyword “scanner” into Google search. Your ad is served but not clicked.

Step 2: After a few minutes of searching without clicking anything, Fred realizes that he needs to be more specific and does a new search for “high speed document scanner.” Fred once again is shown your ad but does not click on it.

Step 3: 10 minutes later, Fred realizes that he likes Kodak scanners so he searches for “high speed document scanners” and clicks your ad, looks at your website for awhile, but leaves without buying.

Step 4: A few days later, Fred now searches for “Kodak i1860 High Speed Color Scanner” follows a paid search ad directly to your site, and places an order.

Where before you would only see step 4, search funnels allow you to see all of the steps. You can discover how long it is taking your customers to buy, how many times your customers are seeing and clicking your ad before buying, and a lot more.

Overall the 7 new reports include:

1. Assisted Conversions
2. Assist Analysis
3. First Click Analysis
4. Last Click Analysis
5. Top Paths
6. Time Lag
7. Path Length

This new feature will be invaluable for marketers looking to fine tune their campaigns. Understanding customer behavior can help with everything from landing page optimization to ad design and even to creating better up-selling and cross-selling strategies.

You can go to the AdWords blog for more information about search funnels.