Search Term Intelligence Boosts Campaign Performance
A WebmasterWorld forum member who advertises $19 products through AdWords, has found that higher CPCs have undermined their campaigns’ profitability. With CPCs rising from 0.05 to between 0.20 and 0.80, and conversion rates sitting at 1%, the beleaguered advertiser was at a loss as to how to achieve acceptable ROI with such a high CPC.
Although there is no simple way of achieving this, there are some sure steps that should enable any savvy paid search campaign manager to lower their campaigns’ CPC while increasing conversion rates.
One very effective way is to match your keywords as closely as possible to the search terms typed into search engines. This needs to be done by gathering intelligence on the actual search terms that people are using. Obtaining this advanced search term information is the difficult part. Google provides the Search Query Report option on AdWords. However the keyword breakdown misses a lot of important detail, making this a less powerful tool.
At Altogether Digital we use an advanced feature of our bid management system to identify all of the search terms that triggered our ads. We then filter these by converting and non-converting clicks to expand our keyword lists and identify possible negative keywords.
To illustrate how this works, if you are bidding on the broad matched keyword ‘florist’ then your ads will be triggered by searches that vary greatly from your keyword. One recent example was the search term ‘florist pall mall,’ which displayed one of our ads because of the broad match setting on the keyword ‘florist.’ Because this search term is relevant to the campaign and resulted in a conversion, it was added as a keyword.
The phrase match keyword ‘flowers delivered’ displayed ads for the search term ‘flowers delivered 24th december’. If we know that no deliveries can be made on that date, then ‘24th december’ can be added as a negative keyword to the campaign.
Adding the exact keyword searched on to your campaigns will ensure a higher quality score, a lower CPC, and a better conversion rate. Given the improbability of the search terms typed into search engines on any given day, there will always be room to adapt paid search campaigns to the actual search behaviour of the online population.
