Analytics Tips - "Wrong Keywords May Be Hazardous To Your Health" I'm terribly allergic to bad keywords. There's something about not finding the lowest priced converting keywords and wasting money on bad keywords that bring about unpleasant ill feelings. Seeking the end to my keyword misery, though, I managed to find the right prescription of analytics that cured this debilitating allergy ... analytics about my keywords.
Perhaps the primary strategy in campaign management is ensuring your keyword list is both comprehensive and restrictive. Comprehensive in the sense that we want to try to bid exact match on every possible keyword phrase a potential customer may use in looking for our product or service. At the same time, we need to restrict our list of phrases to exclude words that could tag along on any broad match keyword phrases that do not relate to our products or services. Using Your Analytics to Expand Your List First let's cover comprehensive. Let's assume we sell office supplies and we first want to work on expanding our keyword list for the different types of pens we sell.
There are a number of great tools to help us get started on expanding our keyword listing, such as Trellian. Once we've begun to gather data about the keywords used by our site visitors, though, the best source of this information is our own analytics.
An outstanding report available in Conversion AnalystTM that's an excellent resource for zeroing in on the best keywords is called the Search Phrases report. The Search Phrases report shows exactly the keyword phrase your visitors used to ultimately end up on your site. You'll find the Search Phrases report by clicking on Marketing in the Reports section, then Search Engines, and then Phrases.
Let's see how simple it is now to find new keywords ...
In our example below, we see that the highest number of visitors to our site as a result of our paid search ads arrived by entering the word pens in the search engine.
The next most frequently used search phrase by visitors was ink pens. Since we're already bidding exact match and have separate targeted ads for both of those phrases, we should be seeing good results.
As we scroll down the list, however, we see 2 phrases that brought visitors to our site that we know we're not bidding exact phrase for: gift pens and click pens.
So how did visitors who typed in those phrases end up on our site? By drilling further down into Conversion AnalystTM, we see it was due to our broad match bidding on the phrase pens. Looks like we've just uncovered an opportunity to better attract more qualified traffic for lower click through charges.
There are 3 huge benefits to bidding on the exact match of gift pens and click pens1. Higher click-through-rate and higher quality traffic with a more focused ad As you create more specific, exact-match keyword phrases, you can create very targeted ads that will outperform your more general ads. For instance, under our broad match pens, our ad read like this:
Quality Pens at Great Prices
Browse our large selection of pens.
Free shipping on orders over $49.
As we break out gift pens into its own AdGroup, we can better tailor the ad to:***
Great Gift Pens For Special Occasions
Create lasting memories with a quality
gift pen. Easy online ordering.
2. Generally, exact match terms are priced lower than their broad match equivalent. This is especially the case when comparing an exact match phrase made up of a group of words against a broad match single word. Also, with our higher click through rate from above, we'll get a higher discount reward on our cost per click from the search engine for having an effective, higher quality ad.
3. And, by driving these visitors to our Gift Pen landing page, we should see a nice increase in our conversion rate compared to driving these prospects to a more general pens page.
Now let's see how this report can help us identify words we don't want to pay for, called "negative keywords" ...
