Keyword Analysis Designing your PPC campaign begins with keyword analysis/selection ...perhaps the most critical step in the process. Following this “cookbook” will help you avoid handicapping your program from the get-go. Developing a list of effective list of keywords that will provide a positive return on investment takes time. Keyword discovery is not a matter of asking your friends, or picking them out of the air because you’re sure this is how people refer to your product or service. A thorough keyword analysis takes at least the better part of a day; but if you’re in the travel industry, or have an e-commerce site, you should plan on a couple of days. Outlined here are the basic steps of building a master list of effective search terms or keyphrases for a pay per click advertising campaign. You’ll find a spreadsheet program useful in helping you create your master list. Identify Your Target AudienceIdentifying your target audience is the first step in the keyword discovery process. Are you trying to reach the end user, or a distributor? This may not seem relevant, but the end user may think of your product or service in a different way than your distributors. It’s not a good idea to assume that you know how either type of user refers to your product or service. Interview your distributors and some end users to learn just how they refer to your product and how they would search for it on the Internet. Log File AnalysisDetermining how your visitors are presently finding your website is especially valuable. Your log files are accessible via your web analytics suite. Some brand names of analytic suites include Web Trends, Click Tracks and Urchin; refer to the Search Term or Key Phrases referrals report. Your webmaster or hosting company can provide this information. These are the search phrases or keyphrases that visitors have historically used to find your website. There are two reasons why this information is valuable. First, advertising using the key phrases where you already rank well organically reinforces or improves your brand identity, and may improve your click-through performance and conversion rate. Secondly, knowing what search terms visitors are already using will help you expand your master list by learning what other phrases relate to the original phrase. Scrape this information and place it your master list. This is also the time to note where the majority of your search traffic comes from. If 75% of your search traffic comes from one particular search engine, then that engine clearly deserves the lion’s share of your initial pay per click budget allocation. Competitive ResearchNow take the phrases that you learned in Identifying your Target Audience and Analyzing your Log Files (above), and use them as search terms in the search engines that will be part of your campaign. Note the top ranked sites and scrape their meta-data information (title, keyword and description tags). Place these phrases in your master list also. Next, review your direct competition and repeat the process of scraping the meta-data from their websites and placing these search phrases in your master list. Internet Based Keyword Generation ToolsThe major engines provide some terrific keyword generating tools, including Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool and Google’s Keyword Tool. Employing both of these will help you populate your master list of keywords by providing related keyphrases and some insight as to each phrase’s popularity. There are also a number of third-party internet-based tools, with WordTracker being arguably the most popular. WordTracker discovers related keyphrases and assigns a Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI, to each search term. A high KEI doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll receive a good deal of traffic for that phrase, but generally means you’ll receive qualified traffic for that phrase for a relatively low cost per click. Keyword SegmentationOnce you have gathered all of your keywords, it’s time to organize them. No doubt you have acquired duplicates, as your analysis went along; using the Sort function in a spreadsheet will make short work of de-duping your list. Now, place your keywords in separate “buckets” – one for each likely descriptor of your product/service (e.g., vacation rentals vs. beachfront rentals vs. condo rentals) – using a separate worksheet in your spreadsheet program for each bucket; then sort the keywords in each worksheet by relevance. Once you begin work on your ad creative, you’ll see the importance of creating these buckets. Ad CreativePersuasive ad copy is the same for PPC as for any advertising channel: your creative must compel the reader/searcher to take a desired action. Search engine advertising makes it crystal clear in a matter of hours or days how well your ads are performing; that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have wait two or three months for your ad to appear in a glossy magazine and hope for the phone to ring. RelevanceHave you ever stopped to notice how you scan a search engine results page (SERP), rather than read it? Did you ever notice how SERPs bold the words you used in your search query? The more your search query mirrors the titles on the SERP, the more apt you are to slow down, take notice, read and click the listing. It’s the same with PPC. When you created your buckets after your keyword analysis, you were already headed toward making your ads more relevant. Let’s suppose you are in the vacation home rental business in Florida. In your keyword analysis you discovered that searchers use the following phrases to search for vacation home rentals in Florida: vacation rentals, villa rentals, condo rentals and beachfront rentals. Had you separated your keywords into those four unique buckets, it would be easy to improve the relevance of your ad by placing that unique phrase in the title of your ad. When a user searches on Florida Beachfront Rentals, the title of your ad would read (in bold) Florida Beachfront Rentals. Benefit statementWhat’s in it for the customer? Be sure to clearly state how you are going to improve the visitor’s vacation, job, data management ...or whatever need motivated his/her query. Another recommended tactic is distinguishing your product or service from the competition. There are a finite amount of characters in the ad descriptors for all three search engines; rather than viewing this as a constraint, savvy advertisers see it as an opportunity to simplify their pitch. Call to ActionNever underestimate the power of a call to action in your ad description. Simply stating something like “Call Now for Your Free Estimate” can improve your ad’s performance twofold ...or even better. Landing PageWhere your ad sends your visitor is, of course, the last step in the process. Ideally, it will be a page specially designed so that its content reflects the offer in your ad creative. It should make it a simple – not tedious – matter for your visitor to provide his/her contact information and receive the item offered. Strategies for SuccessOnce you have keywords, ad creative and a landing page, you have the raw beginnings of a campaign. Making it successful is a matter of continual fine-tuning. There are several strategies for PPC advertising success that every advertiser should employ on a regular basis. Here are three of the most important: Match StrategiesEmploying match strategies on your keywords – Broad, Phrase or Exact (one, or any combination of all three) – will affect your ad’s performance and ultimately your ROI. In general, moving from Broad toward Exact will tend to reduce your number of ads served, but improve the click-through percentage of that smaller traffic volume. Position StrategiesUnless ego is driving your pay per click advertising, it’s a good idea to employ a position strategy. Constantly outbidding your competitors in order to have your ad found in position number one can be extremely costly. If you learned that you could achieve an acceptable ROI at position number 3, and it cost you 70% less, wouldn’t you prefer to generate leads for a fraction of the cost in a less glamorous position? Ad Creative TestingOne of many features that distinguishes Google Adwords from Yahoo Search Marketing is its utilization of a “quality score” (in addition to bid amount) in determining ad position. Yahoo determines rank only by the amount you’re willing to bid on a keyphrase. But improve your quality score on Google, and you’ll improve your position while actually lowering your cost per click. The easiest way to improve your quality score is to employ different ad creatives for each of your buckets. At first, Google will deliver your ads with equal frequency. When searchers begin to show a preference for one ad over another, Google recognizes that ad as being more relevant and begins to show that ad more often. The visitor sees a more relevant ad, the advertiser gets more visitors, and Google makes more money; everybody wins!! Maintaining test controls while making small or subtle changes to each of your ads will improve your quality score over time. Advertisers should always be trying to beat their last best score. Need Still More Info? Further information may be found in our white paper, “Pay Per Click Advertising: The Basics” . Every marketer considering or managing a PPC program should read this paper.
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