“Google Amnesia”: Chances are good you have it, and so do your customers.

You read, hear or see something that pings that area in your brain that says I should go check that out online.

So, you open your favorite browser. And before you’ve even had a chance to type two words into the search bar, you see in your news feed an article that piques your curiosity.  Or the weather tab calls out to you to find out if it’ll be sunny tomorrow.  Or a blog on your favorites bar screams for attention. Or an ad teases a product that just mightbe interesting.

And by the time you’re done going off on a tangent – or two or three – you can’t remember why you opened a browser in the first place.

Sometimes it’ll come back to you and you’ll get back on course. Other times you’ll shrug your shoulders and declare, oh well.

Sound familiar? The phenomenon is common enough that it’s earned a place in the Urban Dictionary, under the definition “Google Amnesia.”  

Knowing that you’re not alone may ease the fear that you’re somehow experiencing grave memory loss, even at the ripe young age you currently are. But, as a strategic marketer, it should raise some flags that are worth considering, as well.

First, the more obvious: we live in an age of distraction – with multi-device, multi-sensory, multi-messaged engagement commonplace at even the most mundane times of the day. If ever there was a case for dramabeing a driving force in creative strategy, and omnichannel, multi-touch frequency as a default targeting strategy, look no further than the lessons of Google Amnesia.

And there’s more to be gleaned if you take a deeper look into whywe often forget whence we’ve come when we open a browser.

One theory that may be analogous to online behavior is called the doorway effect. You’ve probably experienced this too: you arrive somewhere – like your kitchen – only to realize that you can’t remember what you went there to do.  

Research conducted at the University of Notre Dame suggests that, when we pass through a doorway, our memories are often reset to “make room” for a new experience.  Or, as the study calls it, an “event boundary” in the mind. Traversing the doorway gives the mind permission to reset, make room for a new memory, and archive the others. 

So, if you think of a web page as a “room” with its own doorway represented by a tab or link on a browser, you can start to understand – at least metaphorically – why we forget our initial intention(s). And it can be a wakeup call for marketers as they consider their digital strategies.

In short, it’s safe to assume that your prospects and customers are on a continuous journey – and that journey is unremittingly interrupted by distraction. You can stoke intention, but that doesn’t mean it will result in conversion on the first, second or third try.

That’s why, taking the doorway effect and Google amnesia into account, it’s wise to parse the experience you want to create into pieces (“event segmentation”). Every piece can, and should, have a call to action and data gathering objective. But just assume you’re going to lose that prospect or customer to a distraction; getting them back is thus critical, using the many tools at our disposal, such as retargeting. And don’t just bring them back to the same experience they had before; consider what “room” they belong in when they return based on their prior activity.

And if you’re using offline marketing to drive folks online, just remember this: despite your best efforts to instigate a journey, they may forget where they intended to go just steps away from your front door. Any device you can think of to aid their recall is a good thing.