Search Marketing Strategies

The Effects of Keyword Insertion on Ad Performance

Keyword insertion can be a powerful tool in pay per click campaigns, and its ability to increase click through rate is well documented, but how does it affect conversion rate? Recently, one of my clients wanted to run a test to see just what this effect would be. To conduct this test, we took a subset of ad groups selling similar products and populated each of them with two versions of the same ad, one with keyword insertion in the headline and one without. A month later, we bundled the data for each type of ad and compared them against each other for different time periods.

The results we saw were quite interesting:

Time Period	Type	CTR	Improvement	Conversion Rate	Improvement
30 Days	Keyword Insertion	1.02%	12.98%	2.35%
	Regular	0.91%		2.79%	18.72%
2 Weeks	Keyword Insertion	1.03%	14.66%	2.43%
	Regular	0.90%		3.03%	24.27%
7 Day Period 1	Keyword Insertion	1.02%	9.37%	2.31%
	Regular	0.93%		2.83%	22.35%
7 Day Period 2	Keyword Insertion	1.04%	20.29%	2.56%
	Regular	0.86%		3.23%	26.00%

As you can see from the chart, the keyword insertion ads typically outperformed the regular ads on click through rate by about 13% over the 30 day period. On the other hand, the regular ads dominated the keyword insertion ads on conversion rate to the tune of about 19% over that same stretch.

Overall, this means that the regular ads had fewer clicks, but the clicks they did get were of higher quality, leading to a much lower cost per conversion and a better return on investment. The keyword insertion ads were able to bring in more traffic, but it was typically of a lower quality. This was probably due to the keyword insertion ads pulling in search queries that were not relevant to our site, and thus bringing in searchers for whom we had nothing to offer.

Now I’m not suggesting that you pull down all your keyword insertion headlines immediately, as every campaign and business will see different results and have different needs. For this particular client, we are able to bid on keywords that are somewhat broader than what we might use in an average campaign. For this reason, it’s important that we control our ad messaging to prequalify our clicks, and with keyword insertion we evidently lost some of that control.

I would encourage you to run a similar test to see how keyword insertion might affect your campaigns. Be sure to let it run for a long enough period of time to establish statistical significance, and once you have the results, let us know what you found in the comments!

Written by Kevin Hill (kevin.hill (at)channeladvisor.com)

How Effective is "Official Site" in Paid Search?

As we all know, Brand Terms (keywords focused around your company name) convert extremely well, and usually have the highest ROI compared to the other keywords in your Paid Search campaigns.  However, advertisers still need to be maximizing the performance of these keywords and traffic they drive through them.

One way to increase CTR on Brand Ad Groups is to add 'Official Site' to your Ads.  Adding 'Official Site' helps your ad stand out against Affiliates, Coupon Sites, Competitors, etc.  To validate this strategy, we launched a test on one of our clients that has recently seen a decrease in Brand performance.  We attribute the majority of the performance drop-off to an increase in brand-focused Affiliates that make their ads look like the official site, and they even go so far as to create custom landing pages that look very similar to our clients site.  At this point, our client is okay with these affiliates, because they are in a very competitive space with many of their competitors bidding on their brand, so these Affiliates are effectively moving the competition down the page - so our client still gets the sale.

Of note - this was not a straight A/B test, it was a hard cut-over to where the Account Associate expected an increase, so the old ads were cut out entirely.  The analysis looked at the last 2 weeks of the non-Official Site ad versus the first 14 days of the Official Site ads.

So here are the results:

Due to the very competitive nature of the advertisers brand, the 'Official Site' ad had an amazing impact and we were able to more than double the CTR on this Brand Ad Group.

Have you done a test similar to this?  Please comment!

Written by Andrew Belsky (andrew.belsky(at)channeladvisor.com

CAPS in ad copy?

   

All Caps in the Display URL – Does it make a difference?

I have a client that uses their brand name in all capital letters on their website. We tested to see if there would be an increase in CTR if we used all capital letters in their display URLs in their Adwords ads.

I ran a display URL test for a client in their most profitable campaign on all ad groups. I paused all but two Ad Creatives that were identical except for their display URLs. The first display URL was in lowercase, ex. yoursite.com. The second display URL was in all capital letters, ex. YOURSITE.com. Additionally, I set the ads to rotate evenly. After about a week, the lower case ads had a 10.98% CTR and the all caps ads had a 9.81% CTR.

So our test showed that aligning the all capitalization branding did not have a large impact. In my opinion, it is not worth affecting the quality score, so I am going to continue running the lower case ads because they had the higher CTR.

written by Erin Gordon -- erin.gordon at channeladvisor.com

Writing Compelling Ad Copy

I was able to sit in on a session at SES NY 2008 (Search Engines Strategies, New York), given by Jason Miller (CTO of Engine Ready Software), entitled “Creating Compelling Ads”, and he had some interesting thoughts that I wanted to touch on:

1. Don’t start with a blank ad.  When you start to write your ad copy, don’t start from scratch, instead see what kind of ad copy is already out there for that query. You want to set yourself apart from what currently exists, so use the ad copy that is out there as your basis, and make sure that your ad stands out from the crowd.

2. Utility vs. Emotional ads.  When should you write an emotional ad, and when should you write a utility focused ad?  The answer seems to be: do whatever the majority is NOT doing (again, in order to set yourself apart).  So if the majority of the ads are utilitarian, simply stating what is being sold, with a dry call to action (e.g. “price has dropped”, “ships free”, etc.), then you would want your ad to be more on the emotional side (e.g. “huge savings on the freshest gear!”, “take advantage of great deals now!”etc.), in order to set yourself apart. 

3. “Free” is a very powerful word, “Free shipping” is not as powerful.  Jason’s thought was that if everyone is offering free shipping in their ad copy, then it doesn’t make sense for you to use it in yours (as it doesn’t set you apart).  I disagree with this one though-  there have been studies done, and we’ve certainly seen it in practice for our clients, that show that “free shipping” is still one of the most compelling phrases that you can put in your ad copy.  In my experience, it’s still one of the things that users look for.  If you don’t have to worry about shipping, that's a huge thing when you’re shopping around for the best price.  Do you look for “Free shipping” when searching for products on Google- I do.

4. The last good take-away was the notion that “your ad is a window into your site”.  When writing ad copy, make sure you capture the essence of the landing page.  This is sometimes hard to do when you only have 25 characters for a title and 70 characters for ad copy.  However, the goal is to try to give the user insight into the page that they will see when they click on the ad.  If you don’t do this, you will likely see a higher than normal bounce rate.

Look out for more posts from SES NY, we’ll try to grab the most interesting pieces to share with you.

written by Tim Walker -- tim.walker at channeladvisor.com