Using Keywords Part 4: Squeeze every bit of value from pay per click

PPC advertising now makes up a substantial share of search marketing spend. Paying for an advert when someone clicks on it reduces the up-front cost associated with traditional advertising and brings a powerful, revenue-generating machine within the grasp of any size of business.

Keywords are at the heart of PPC advertising

As with organic search, keywords are at the heart of PPC campaigns but the dynamics are different.

Organic search is frequently perceived as free and while there is no payment to the search engine, there is a very definite cost in creating the content that must accompany each keyword if it is to have any chance of success. Therefore the number of keywords you optimize for is limited by the resources you have to create content around them. And of course, you will not start to see the results until many weeks have elapsed.

AdWords is easy to control

On the other hand pay per click (PPC) is easily controllable and measurable. Success depends on finding the keywords that attract the most clickthroughs and the highest return on investment.

If a keyword doesn’t attract traffic, it doesn’t cost you money.
You’ll start getting results quickly and can see what works and what doesn’t.
A keyword that isn’t working can be discarded instantly.

So a popular strategy for PPC is to start with a large number of keywords and test their performance through the detailed analytics provided by Google AdWords, for example.

The higher the number of keywords you start with, the higher your chances of quickly finding the ones that are going to bring you the greatest return on investment.

The AdWords customer journey

Before you start your keyword research, it’s important to be clear about your campaign’s objectives.

PPC can deliver visitors, but will they buy? You might try and make a sale there and then, or recruit email addresses and attempt a sale later; or you might just be interested in branding or visits.

Your objective should determine which keywords you’re targeting and how much you’re prepared to spend.

Wordtracker’s PPC expert Ian Howie, believes that customers pass through the following different stages on their journey from research to brand loyalty. At each stage they use different search techniques:

Research
Consideration
Purchase (or lead generation)
Loyalty

The number of keywords, order of keywords and the meaning of the keywords used help us identify what stage of the purchase journey a customer is on:

Research keywords tend to contain one or two words.
Consideration keywords tend to contain two or three words.
Purchase keywords tend to be long tail – having three or more words.
Loyalty keywords are brand based.

To increase your return on investment (ROI) you want to capture searchers at the consideration and purchase stages of their journey.

Here’s how Wordtracker’s Keywords tool can help

As we’ve seen in earlier articles, Wordtracker's professional Keywords tool can help you find these long tail keywords. Its database will allow you to identify hundreds, if not thousands of relevant keywords with just a few minutes’ work.

Many people start their campaigns with just 30 or 40 keywords but according to PPC guru Perry Marshall, any site needs a minimum of 200 keywords to start with.

Of course, the search engines provide their own keyword suggestion tools, but using Wordtracker’s tools can give you a serious competitive advantage. Here are some important ways:

The ability to suggest related terms and dig into the long tail of search terms is a perfect complement to the search engine’s own tools. Many of your less savvy competitors may not use Wordtracker’s tools and you will have access to information that they do not have.

Let’s imagine that you’re trying to sell tea online. You can use a Related Keywords search (the orange tool) to expand your keyword lists. A search on the keyword tea will generate up to 300 related keywords.

Figure 4.1: A Related Keywords search on tea shows up to 300 new keywords

The Keywords tool will give you a wide range of keywords related to tea. The first 15 results alone are interesting. For example, you might not previously have considered red tea (14th on the list) as a market niche – it’s one to investigate later!

Once you’ve found profitable keywords in your PPC campaign, you can use Wordtracker’s Keywords tool to give you similar keywords that are also likely to be profitable.

So, continuing with our example, you could run a search on red tea to investigate that niche further.

Figure 4.2: A search on red tea using the Keywords tool

The results throw up some more examples that you could test in your PPC campaigns. Red raspberry leaf tea anyone?

For PPC campaigns that are failing to deliver profits, the Keywords tool can help you find new keywords to test.

Using the tea campaign as an example, in the Keywords tool enter the keywords that most define the campaign. In this case let’s assume that we’re setting up a campaign for: green tea

Then configure your settings. We recommend starting with ‘Google’ checked if this is your first search (choose ‘Wordtracker’ when you want to dig deeper into the long tail). Search for ‘Match: Keywords in any order’ and include ‘plurals’. Choose the territory that applies to you (US or UK).

Figure 4.3: A search on green tea

Click ‘Search’ and you’ll get back up to 1,000 keywords containing green tea. Using these long tail terms in your campaigns is more likely to make your campaigns relevant to users’ searches. And – here’s the best bit - Google rewards relevant adverts with a lower cost per click.

Find negative keywords to lower AdWords costs

The Keywords tool can help you:

Find negative keywords – terms that you don’t want to advertise against. Before you make your campaign live, spending time researching negative keywords that you want to exclude is guaranteed to save you a whole load of money!

Using our previous example, select all your green tea keywords by clicking on ‘Select: All’. Now ‘Deselect’ (‘uncheck’) the ‘positive’ keywords – that is the keywords you want to bid on and have your adverts appear for.

This will leave the negative keywords checked.

Make sure you go through all the pages – that’s up to 10 pages of green tea keywords.

The more negative keywords you can find, the lower your advertising costs are likely to be!

In our example, you might discover that competitors’ brand names adversely affect your clickthrough rates, so you want to exclude them from your campaigns. In this case, you’d leave lipton green tea checked.

Figure 4.4: You might choose to exclude competitors’ brand names, such as ‘Lipton’ from your campaign

Once you’ve chosen your negative keywords, click on ‘Save’.

Next, click on ‘Save selected keywords to:’

Figure 4.5: Save your negative keywords to a new List and give it a suitable name

Give your List a name, such as ‘Green Tea Campaign Level Negative Keywords’.

You can then export your negative keywords, add them to your AdWords campaigns, and you’ll immediately reduce your spend.

What PPC tactics should you use?

PPC keywords that get lots of clickthrough (ie, get lots of visits) but do not convert well may be ideal candidates for organic optimization.

Someone searching on digital photography probably does not want to buy a digital camera immediately and would be a poor PPC target. However, it is likely that in future they will want to buy – so that visitor would be an ideal target for content optimized around digital photography order to attract them on to your opt-in mailing list.

A well-proven tactic is to offer PPC visitors something irresistible like a downloadable report or a free trial. With these freebies comes an agreement to receive future emails, perhaps in the form of a newsletter. The newsletter is then used to prove your knowledge, build trust and make a sale.

More about AdWords and PPC

In this one article it’s impossible to tell you about all the ways that Wordtracker’s Keywords tool can help you with your PPC campaigns.

So, if you’re serious about using Google’s AdWords to improve your marketing, you should read Wordtracker’s "PPC Basics". This 44-page guide shows you how to use the Keywords tool to find the best terms for your PPC campaigns.

Download your free copy of PPC Basics here.

More in-depth PPC advice … for a better AdWords strategy

If you’ve already set up a campaign that hasn’t done as well as you’d hoped, or you’re looking for more detail on PPC best practice, we recommend: Wordtracker Masterclass: Google AdWords PPC Advertising.

This 157-page e-book is a comprehensive guide to creating a profitable PPC campaign (without throwing your money down a black hole). You’ll discover: