It’s All Relative

Since CPC prices are often closely linked to the potential profitability of a sale from that keyword, the CPC price is often a mute point. A ‘bad credit history remortgage’ could be worth $15,000 profit to a remortgage broker, so having CPCs in excess of $50.00 can deliver a strong return on investment.

On the other hand, the keyword ‘New York weather’ has little commercial intention, so keywords such as this tend to benefit from low CPCs.

While this relativity of CPC prices makes CPC comparisons across sectors rather meaningless, most PPC advertisers would jump at the chance to pay lower CPCs. So below are 4 strategies I’ve found useful for achieving lower CPCs, while still maintaining a strong conversion rate.

Source: Wordstream

1. Use Long Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are those highly-specific, infrequently searched-for phrases such as ‘all inclusive holidays to Paris from Sydney’, which turn up in your search query report. Since they tend to have less advertiser competition, they can be considerably cheaper than more generic keywords such as ‘Paris holidays’.

What’s more, since people making long-tail searchers have arguably carried out the large majority of their pre-purchase research, and are often further along in the buying cycle, long-tail searches can have a considerably higher conversion rate.

Cheaper CPCs and higher conversion rates were exactly what I found when analysing search queries containing different numbers of words. Searches containing 4 or more words performed consistently better than searches containing fewer than 4 words.

Recommendations:

• Use Google’s Keyword Tool to research keywords which have approximately 100 searches/month. These tend to get overlooked by a large number of PPC advertisers.
• Take advantage of the ‘more like these’ feature in Google’s Keyword Tool to continue to build your list of long-tail keywords.
• Run a search query report to look at the search queries which get matched to your keywords. If they are relevant, and have a decent click volume, add them as new keywords and give them their own tailored ads. This way, instead of long-tail searches being matched to your more generic keywords, they will now be matched to longer keywords, giving you more control over ad messages and bid optimisation.

2. Research Uncompetitive Themes

Keywords which have less competition often have lower CPCs. Finding keyword with less competition often requires you to think outside the box, although with the right tools and approach you can be diversifying your keyword portfolio in no time.

Recommendations:

• Plug the URL of a competitor’s website into Google’s Keyword Tool and see what comes up. If their products and services are worded differently to yours, it can uncover some previously-overlooked terminology.
• Mine your search query report to uncover themes which you previously overlooked. Don’t worry if a search query has only a handful of clicks –you’re trying to research new themes from searches which have matched to your existing keywords, so click volumes would likely be much greater if they are added as new keywords.
• Look for numbers which frequently crop up in your search query report. If you’re selling holidays, consider how people type the dates into their search, such as ‘France holidays December 2011′, or ‘winter 2012 skiing deals Queenstown’. If you can provide tailored ads which cater for these date searches, you will likely receive high click through rates (CTR), high Quality Scores, and low CPCs.
• Use Google Insights for Search to find breakout searches. These are searches which have recently increased in popularity by at least 400%, and can be excellent opportunities for highly-profitable keyword targeting due to their relatively low competition and relatively low CPCs.
• Ask friends or family how they might search for your products and services.

3. Use Modified Broad Match

Modified Broad Match is a variation of broad match, but allows you greater control over the types of search queries which trigger your ads. By placing a plus (+) sign in front of certain words in your keyword, Google will only match your keyword to searches which contain all of the words with a preceding plus sign.

So if your keyword was ‘+cheap +deals to +Rome’, you can be sure than any searches matching to your keyword must contain the words ‘cheap’, ‘deals’, and ‘Rome’.

Modified broad match is a great way to improve the quality and profitability from your AdWords campaigns. In some recent research I carried out on modified broad match keywords, keywords with a greater amount of broad match modification tended to have considerably higher CTRs and significantly lower CPCs.

Recommendations:

• Take advantage of modified broad match. It allows you greater control over the types of searches which trigger your keywords.
• Be mindful that restricting the match types of your keywords may reduce your click volume, so compensate for this by researching additional keywords and themes.
• Broad match generation can also be a useful tool to allow your more generic non-modified broad match keywords to catch relevant search traffic which have not yet been added as modified broad match keyword.

4. Be Relevant

Despite PPC often being dubbed as saturated and highly-competitive, the truth is there are massive opportunities everywhere for PPC advertisers to achieve high profitability by providing highly-relevant and helpful ads, which engage with their target audience.

Searches on Google are now becoming increasingly diverse, complex, and unique, and users are expecting a higher degree of relevancy and helpfulness from search results. If you can be the advertiser which caters for the specific needs and requirements of searchers, visitors will reward you with their wallets. And since click through rate (CTR) is a large component of Quality Score, if you can achieve a high CTR, low CPCs will naturally follow.

Recommendations:

• Create hundreds of highly-granular ad groups, each containing only a handful of very similar keywords.
• Tailor your ad messages to your ad group’s keywords. If the ad group contains keywords related to ‘Winter 2012 Queenstown holidays’, ensure your ads also mention cater for Queenstown holidays in Winter 2012.
• Run an ad group report and find your ad groups which receive a large number of clicks. Changes are those ad groups are being matched to a large number of very different searches, so could benefit from being split out. The 10% Clicks Rule is a useful tool for quickly and efficiently identifying your ad groups which could benefit from being split out. Follow the 3 part guide for step-by-step instructions of how to do this.
• Examine your ad groups with high CPCs and low CTRs. Consider how closely your search queries match to that ad group’s ads. If a gap exists between the ad group’s searches and the ad group’s ads, consider how you can make changes to boost your relevancy.

Return on Investment is the Goal

Quality Score doesn’t sell anything. Click through rate doesn’t sell anything. CPCs don’t sell anything. Improving these metrics should not be the objective of your campaign. Improving ROI should be.

All other things equal, if you reduce your CPCs by 20%, great!

But are all other things equal? In trying to reduce your CPCs, have your sacrificed volume? Have you sacrificed quality? Are paying lower CPCs simply because visitors are now less relevant and less likely to convert? Are you now missing out on more relevant and potentially more profitable searches?

CPCs or Quality Score or CTR should not be the end goal of your PPC campaign. Return on investment should be. There’s no harm in paying 50% higher CPCs if your profit increases by 60%. So only use CPCs as a guide.

By all means use long-tail keywords, search query reports, and modified broad match as a means to lower your CPCs. But make sure your sales volume and ROI also rises as a result.

Alan Mitchell is a Google AdWords certified PPC specialist based in Melbourne, Australia, with over 4 years running successful PPC campaigns for businesses in Australia and overseas. Find out how the specialist PPC management such as the 4 PPC strategies above can help you improve your return on investment from PPC marketing, or get in touch for more information.

We all know first impressions count. First impressions are crucial for forming beliefs and expectations about a business and its product and service offering. And since your pay per click (PPC) ads are one of your first touch points with online potential customers, and one you have massive control over, your PPC ads are your first opportunity to mould a positive image of your business to potential customers.

Just like it makes sense to invest in a shiny new lobby or reception area to create a positive first impression to new prospective clients, so it also makes sense to ensure your PPC ads portray professionalism, trust and credibility. Below are 9 suggestions of how to appear more credible on Google to better engage with potential customers and increase your conversion rate.

1. Spelling

Make sure spelling in your ads is correct – even when matching to mis-spelt keywords. Avoid dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) for mis-spelt and highly-generic keywords. Export your PPC campaigns to Excel and run a spell-check – you’ll be surprised how easily typos can crop up in ads.

2. Grammar

Make sure your messages are grammatically correct and read clearly as a sentence. Stay away from over-abbreviated ‘txt msg’ style wording which looks amateur and unprofessional. Avoid ‘keyword stuffing’, especially when it is at the expense of message flow. Instead, try including words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and ‘to’, which can help your messages read more elegantly and portray a better image of your brand.

3. Capitalisation

Be consistent with capitalisation. Whether you’re using start case or only capitalising open-class words, make sure it’s consistent. Experiment with capitalisation to find the style which works best for your business.

4. Punctuation

Avoid over-use of hyphens, commas and other unnecessary punctuation. Special characters can draw the eye, and achieve a higher click through rate, but it can make you look rather amateur and can affect conversion rates. Google only allows one exclamation mark in PPC ads, but that doesn’t mean you have to use an exclamation mark in every ad. Sometimes subtle is better.

5. Closure

Unless your ad is written as a single sentence across both lines of ad text, make sure description line 1 and description line 2 end in a full stop (or exclamation mark). If your ad does not contain full-stops because you’ve reached your 35 character limit, choose a shorter message to close off the sentence with a full stop. Think about how your ads will read now that Google are implementing longer headlines, where both your headline and description line 1 are displayed as a single headline. Does it read well? Does your message make sense in this format?

6. Equality

Try to make both description lines of your ads equal in length. Neatly-formatted ads look clear, concise and well-considered, so avoid having one line of text significantly longer than the other. Try to use 30-35 characters where possible, but also experiment with shorter messages of 25-30 characters. Words such as ‘Now’, ‘Today’, and ‘Online’ are often useful buffer words for creating ad descriptions of equal lengths.

7. Clear Message

Don’t waffle. Have a clear message and give the impression you understand your product. Be specific, state your unique selling points (USPs), and use prices and numbers to quantify your claims. Ads with a clear and confident focus will look and perform considerably better than those with a highly generic message.

8. Display URLs

Avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ your display URLs. Including search terms in display URLs might make your ad more visible and may improve CTR and Quality Score, but since longer URLs are often considered less credible, conversion rates may suffer. Sometimes a shorter display URL looks better than one which tries too hard.

9. Relevancy

No-one likes irrelevant amateur-looking ads, and ads which look like they understand customer needs portray a sense of credibility and authority. Ensure your ads are personalised to users’ search queries and include keywords in headlines and descriptions where possible. Take time to invest in a granular ad group structure.

Conclusion

First impressions count. No more so than on Google, with a huge number of people using Google to carry out initial research about a product or service. Your Google AdWords campaigns are often your first contact with new potential customers, so it’s essential to portray your business in a positive light to maximise your chance of conversion.

Don’s be like eBay and find your PPC campaigns being talked about for all the wrong reasons. Ensure your PPC campaigns give off a message to be proud of.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how specialist PPC marketing can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.

Or so the theory goes.

But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?

There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.

Capturing less relevant search traffic and achieving a good return on investment involves 3 crucial steps – separation, qualification, and persuasion.

1) Separation

“Keywords of differing levels of qualification should be separated into their own campaigns”

Start with your most relevant and highly-qualified keywords. These are your cream of the crop keywords in terms of relevancy. If you are selling luxury apartments in New York, for example, keywords in this highly relevant campaign may include a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). People searching for ‘luxury apartment for sale in New York’ would be an extremely high quality of visitor, so these keywords must be kept separate in their own campaign.

In your next campaign, create keywords which are slightly less relevant. Keywords in this campaign might contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’), but not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘world class property NYC’ is still relevant, but since it does not contain the words ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’, they need to be kept separate so they can optimized separately.

Next, create a campaign for keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘New York property for sale’ or ‘buy an apartment NY’ are still somewhat relevant, but since they don’t contain any descriptive or purchase qualifier, they need to be kept separate.

Then create yet another campaign for keywords with a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) and a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or buy’), but without a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). This campaign will include keywords such as ‘exclusive apartments to buy’ or ‘prestigious real estate for sale’), which although are somewhat relevant, do not contain any mention of location so need to be kept separate. To increase the relevancy of keywords in this campaign, you might want to geo-target the campaign to a particular geographic area (e.g. searchers located in New York).

Keep creating campaigns, each with keywords of slightly less relevancy, until you start getting very generic and ambiguous keywords such as ‘New York apartments’. By now you should have a few different campaigns, each identifiable by the amount of qualification their keywords contain. Your campaigns may look something like the following:

• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | LOCATION
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• PROPERTY | LOCATION

As you move from one campaign to the next, keywords in your campaigns become less qualified and more ambiguous.

Now comes the exciting part – qualifying your ads.

2) Qualification

“Ad messages should be qualified to cater for different types of searchers”

While showing your best performing ads might work for your highly relevant keywords, using the same ads for less relevant keywords will have very different results. Using the same ‘tried and tested’ ads for less relevant keywords is a major reason why many PPC advertisers complain about the poor profitability of less relevant keywords. It’s not the keywords which are to blame; it’s the poorly qualified ads.

To achieve a strong return on investment from less relevant and more ambiguous keywords, such as ‘apartments in New York’, you need to qualify your ads. The less relevant your keyword, the more qualification is needed in your ads. When a user searches for something generic and ambiguous like ‘apartments in New York’, you are not able to tell whether she is looking to buy or rent an apartment in New York, nor are you able to determine the type of apartment they are seeking (whether it’s luxury, spacious, cheap etc). You therefore need to qualify your ad messages, providing clarity on the crucial missing information your searcher failed to include.

For your keywords which do not include a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘buy’ or ‘for sale’), make it clear you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments) by including words such as ‘buy’, ‘for sale’, ‘now selling’, or ‘from $3.5m’. When a searcher sees a price or a purchase qualifier in your ad, they will immediately know you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments), which will reduce the number of rental seekers clicking on your ads.

Similarly, for your keywords which do not include a location qualifier, make your location extremely clear in your ad messages to minimize wasted clicks from people searching for properties in irrelevant locations. And for your keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘world class’), ensure the searcher understands you are selling high-end property by using words such as ‘luxury’, ‘world class’, and ‘from $3.5m’ in your ads. This will help to filter out first time buyers or property seekers looking for low cost properties.

Qualifying your ads need not be a difficult task. One of the main reasons why you separated your keywords into different campaigns in step 1 is to make ad qualification all the more easier. By keeping keywords of differing levels of qualification spate, you should be able to quickly and easily create ad messages with the appropriate amount of message qualification.

Next comes the interesting part that is crucial to achieve profitability from less relevant keywords – persuasion.

3) Persuasion

“Ad messages should make it clear you are not offering the product or service the user has searched for, but provide clear messages as to why they should consider you as a substitute”

If you are an artificial grass manufacturer, for example, and you wanted to show ads for ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’, you need to persuade searchers why they should change their mind and consider purchasing artificial grass instead. Messages such as ‘Grass that never needs watering’ or ‘Find out why you should go artificial’ might do the trick.

Similarly, if you’re a 4* hotel in Manhattan, New York, and want to reach people searching for hotels in the close by Midtown, New York, don’t just bid on the keyword ’4 star hotels midtown’ and show a generic Manhattan ad. Don’t just include the word ‘Midtown’ in your ads either, as that would mislead potential customers, and result in wasted clicks and few conversions. Mention the word ‘Midtown’ in your ad, but instead point out how far your hotel is away from Midtown. An ad such as the following would do nicely.

You’ve made it clear your hotel is not in Midtown, but clearly suggested why they should consider you anyway. You will filter out those people who must stay in Midtown, but encourage people who are flexible to consider your hotel. And since you’ve pre-qualified your ad messages, you’ve set their expectations at the right level which will help to deliver a strong conversion rate.

Relevancy Is Still King

While separation, qualification and persuasion can help to deliver strong profitability from slightly less relevant keywords, relevancy is still essential for paid search success. There is little point bidding on the keywords ‘apartment decorating’ or ‘the apartment film review’ to sell New York apartments, so keywords must still be somewhat relevant to your offering.

That said, if it’s approached intelligently, the three-pronged attack of separation, qualification, and persuasion should enable you to target less relevant keywords and still achieve a good return on investment. Separation allows you to keep your different keywords separate, qualification helps you reduce wasteful clicks, and persuasion helps you increase your conversion rate. Use all three strategies together, and they can be extremely powerful at increasing conversion volume within your cost budgets.

Are you a fan of the mid-tail? Have you found it possible to achieve a good return from slightly less relevant keywords? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

When it comes to choosing landing pages for paid search ads, there is only one rule which must be followed: the page must be relevant to the user’s search query.

Other than ensuring a highly relevant user journey is delivered, there are no clear rules explicitly stating how a landing page should be designed, structured and styled, nor is there a landing page formula which works for everyone. Landing pages selection is about finding out what works best for your business, products, services, target audience, keywords and ads, through ongoing testing and optimisation.

Landing page performance will therefore vary depending on countless numbers of variables, making landing page best practice ambiguous. That said, it is important to be aware of the reasoning and implications behind any landing page strategy, to enable more informed landing page selection and more insightful testing and optimisation when comparing one landing page to another.

So to better understand the issues which arise when choosing landing pages, let’s consider one common dilemma which a large number of advertisers face: whether or not to deep-link.

Deep-Linking School of Thought

Deep-linking takes the searcher to pages deep into your site, hence the name. If you are an electrical retailer, for example, and someone searches for ‘Delonghi Coffee Machine ESAM3500’, a deep-linking strategy would take the searcher directly to your Delonghi Coffee Machine ESAM3500 product page, displaying information and price details for the Delonghi ESAM3500.

The benefits of deep-linking are as follows:

1. Relevancy

The user has specified they are looking for the Delonghi Coffee Machine ESAM3500, so taking them through to your Delonghi ESAM3500 will deliver a highly relevant user journey, as per Relevancy: The Holy Grail of Search > better user engagement and a higher chance of conversion.

2. Price Awareness

Users can immediately see the price of the product, so you can ensure your price is being conveyed to every visitor > better conversion rate if price-competitive.

3. Focus

No distraction from other products and offerings keeps the user focused > reduced exit rate and reduced chance of downgrading to cheaper alternatives.

4. Efficient

Deep-linking can prevent lazy searchers from leaving the site if they can’t immediately find the product they searched for > reduced bounce rate.

Category-Linking School of Thought

Category-linking takes the searcher of ‘Delonghi Coffee Machine ESAM3500’ to your coffee machines or Delonghi category page, which includes the Delonghi ESAM3500 along with other similar coffee machines by Delonghi and other brands.

The benefits of category-linking are as follows:

1. Satisfaction

Taking the user to a category page forces the user to find the product themselves. When they do so, they gain a sense of satisfaction and will become highly engaged with the site > high user engagement > high conversion rate.

2. Environment

Users don’t feel pressured they are being ‘forced’ into buying a particular product and like choice > more relaxed > more likely to buy.

3. Comparison

Users can see other similar products, so can compare alternatives they might not have previously noticed > higher chance of buying something. Even if the customer downgrades to a cheaper alternative, it is still a sale and you have the customer for life > higher sales volume and increased customer base.

4. Authenticity

Multiple products creates a sense of credibility > higher conversion rate.

5. Time on Site

Users spend longer on the site when more products are available. People are often only willing to spend a finite amount of time and effort comparing products or services before they buy. Excessive comparison can be mentally tiring, especially if numerous variables are on offer, so maximising the time on site maximises the chance the user will stop comparing and just buy > higher conversion rate.

Landing Page Testing

It’s a tough call. Both deep-linking and category-linking deliver some strong – albeit untested and speculative – psychological arguments in favour of their method.

But no-one said it was going to be clear cut. Paid search management, after all, is about the ongoing testing and optimisation of a campaign to find the methods which work best for your business. What might work best for Joe Bloggs Electrical might not work best for Adam Smith Wired; and what might work for your coffee maker keywords, might not work for your washing machines keywords. Paid search success favours the patient, so keep testing and optimising.

So to deep-link or not to deep-link? You decide.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how specialist PPC marketing can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

Sometimes, if conversion data is scarce, click-through-rate (CTR) is instead used to evaluate a keyword’s performance. If a keyword generates only 5 clicks from 1,000 impressions, it has a CTR of 0.5% so is deemed irrelevant. The keyword is then paused or relegated to the second page of search result obscurity.

This is not the right approach.

Beyond the Click

There is more to paid search management than optimising keywords based only on conversion rates and click-through-rates. A more intelligent approach also considers what happens once a user clicks on your ad:

• How many pages are they viewing?
• How long are they spending on your site?
• How many people are immediately bouncing?
• How many people are returning at a later date?

If a keyword has a poor conversion rate and a poor click through rate, but people are viewing a large number of pages, spending a long time on your site and returning regularly, the keyword may be doing a great job at creating awareness of your products or services. Even though conversion rate may be low, the keyword may not deserve to be paused or have its bid reduced – instead it may be beneficial to increase its bid to allow the keyword to flourish and user engagement to increase.

Similarly, if a keyword is converting well but 80% of people are immediately bouncing, finding out why – perhaps by looking at search queries being matched to the keyword – could help the keyword convert even better.

How to Optimise a Campaign Intelligently

Analytics software, such as Google Analytics, are incredibly useful in helping to understand what people do after they click on your ad and land on your site. If your Google Analytics account is linked to your Google AdWords account, it is possible to see page views, time on site and bounce rate for each of your AdWords campaigns, ad groups and keywords (select Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns).

Once you’ve logged into Google Analytics, look at each of your campaigns:

• Which campaigns are engaging users with a high time spent on site? Why?
• Which campaigns are bringing in untargeted users who immediately bounce back and go elsewhere? Why?
• Which campaigns are persuading users to come back later? Why?

Next, drill down to ad group level and keywords level (if you have enough data) and ask yourself the same questions. 100 visits is usually significant to make reliable, informed decisions – but be careful about drawing conclusions for keywords / ad groups with less than 30 visits.

Make a note of those campaigns, ad groups and keywords which stand out, both positively and negatively. Look for common words that regularly appear in unusually high or unusually low metrics, such as ‘cheap’, ‘discount’ and ‘free’. How have they performed? Probably very different to your more generic keywords, you would imagine, but in what way?

Look for locations, product names and other qualifiers – can you notice any trends? Are there certain keywords with a high bounce rate? Could any negatives be added to reduce bounce rate?

Record any trends and resulting changes in a log. This is your insight on user engagement, and will not only help you develop a improved paid search campaign which will better connect with users, but will also help you better understand your audience and make more informed, strategic business decisions.

How to Optimise a Campaign Even More Intelligently

If you’re feeling more ambitious, export the keyword data to Excel and VLOOKUP each keyword’s Analytics performance to its AdWords performance (select Traffic Sources  > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns > “dimension” = “keywords” > export > CSV for Excel).

That way, when you’re looking at each keyword’s costs, CTR, conversions and ROI, you can also consider page views, time on site, returning visits and bounce rate, and better understand each keyword’s impact on creating awareness and interest.

Look at keyword 8 in the example below. It has a low conversion rate and a high cost per conversion, so based on conversion performance it should perhaps be paused. But notice how page views, time on site and bounce rate are all exceptionally good. Should the keyword really really be paused? It seems to be engaging users well, so why not instead find out why its conversion is so low?

Similarly, keyword 9 is converting well, but if it’s bounce rate could be reduced, it could become even more profitable. Play around with new ideas and experiment optimising bids based on different metrics.

It’s All About Engagement

The next time you optimise your campaign, remember there’s more to paid search management than conversions. If, like the majority of Americans, you’ve ever researched your next holiday, browsed that DVD player or shortlisted those birthday presents on your lunch break at work, only to buy online when you get home (on a different IP address), you will appreciate that keyword conversion data can only get you so far.

Conversion optimisation is naturally biased towards converting keywords, so will tend to ignore keywords at earlier stages of the buying cycle, which may play an essential role in creating awareness, generating interest and engaging users with your products, services and brand.

Conversion data – and automated tools which optimise keywords based on conversion data – are not the be all and end all of paid search management. Understanding user engagement could well be, and the tools to get you started are right at your fingertips.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how an analytical approach to PPC marketing can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.