Search Marketing Strategies

Keyworlds of Opportunity

During these rough economic times, many internet retailers are forced to make hasty optimization decisions in an effort to maximize profitability.  Traditionally, if a keyword brings in clicks and/or cost with little to no return it is aggressively bid down or paused altogether.

Most of the time, this seems like the right thing to do – you’re maximizing your account efficiency by controlling the bleeding.  However, what if I told you that these keywords are your keys to opportunity?

Any savvy search marketer will, or at least should tell you that the most important metric in a paid search campaign is conversion rate.  If you are in the business of making money, you want more than just visitors to your site.  You want to close those customers at the highest frequency possible.

With tools like Google Website Optimizer, all advertisers now have the ability to test changes they make to landing pages.  Tweaks can be made to messaging, look/feel, images, etc, in an effort to convert visitors.

Try using the following strategy:

1)    Run a keyword report spanning the past few weeks. 
2)    Eliminate any keywords that brought in conversions.
3)    Sort the report by the number of clicks (largest to smallest)

What you are left with is not a list of keywords to pause, but rather a list of conversion opportunity!  You now have a prioritized list of keywords that potential customers are not only searching on, but also finding your ads relevant enough to generate a click.

If a keyword has a large number of clicks but no orders, first make sure that keyword is relevant to your product/service and then take a deep dive into the relationship of that keyword to its landing page.  Is the page functioning properly?  Is the page relevant, and if so, as specific to the search query as possible?  Is your price competitive?

These keywords have proven that they can generate traffic.  Make every effort to convert the visitors they bring in.  Any increase in conversion rate for these terms will not increase your ROI by lowering cost, but by increasing revenue.

Written by Dennis Hayes(Dennis.Hayes at ChannelAdvisor dot com)

Paid Search Best Practice: Build out the 'Smart Tail'

If you are familiar at all with Paid Search, you have definitely heard of the concept of the 'Long Tail.'  Long-Tail, in terms of keywords, are the highly targeted, low frequency terms in your account.  At ChannelAdvisor, we have found that these terms can be highly profitable and can add up to a significant chunk of advertisers Order Mix. 

However, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.  Fairly often we will onboard a new account who has been with another Paid Search vendor and see that the account has 10,000's to 100,000's of keywords which at first glance looks like an extremely built out account.  But as we dig deeper, we'll see a lot of low quality 'long tail' type of keywords that will never get any sort of Impressions.  Agencies will often use a keyword multiplier to hastfully build out the long tail to show the client that something has been done.  But a lot of these keywords can be 5,6,7,8+ words long which will never get searched.  To prove this theory, we pulled a year's worth of client data in our system to show performance KPI's and group by word length.  Here's what this analysis showed:

As you can see clearly, there is a huge drop off when you get to 5 word keywords.  Is it really worth building, launching, and creating ads for all of these other 5+ word keywords?  We don't think so.  Our recommendation is to intelligently mine the tail for keywords that users will actually query, and this means building out quality terms that are 5 or less words long.  Anything longer is just a waste of time.

Written by andrew (dot) belsky (at) channeladvisor.com

Better Broad Match?

Often the bane of search marketers, broad match keywords can get a huge number of clicks, but it can be challenging to insure that you are getting the right searchers that lead to conversions. I imagine that every experienced search marketer has seen a campaign with the broad match term like "shirt" or "ball" driving cost through the roof. On the other hand, when the broad match terms are created carefully along with targeted ads and appropriate negative keywords, they can bring in high quality traffic.

Google has posted some interesting stats related to broad match. For example, 20% of search queries are ones that haven't been searched on in the previous 90 days, or possibly at all. It's unlikely that the most determined keyword-generating search marketer could cover this entire long tail. At the same time, 1/3 of all clicks and conversions are on broad match keywords.

My thinking is that the engines, in particular Google, are investing enormous resources trying to improve the accuracy of the search results displayed, including the relevance of the paid ads. Broad matching has gotten so much better than in the early days of search that search marketers should reconsider their biases against it. It just may be that broad match performs well. And with all things search, do a test. If the ROI is there, simpler broad match terms may increase your revenue and save a lot of time and money trying to create good coverage with phrase and exact match.

Written by Jason James (jason.james at channeladvisor dot com).

Lowdown on Negatives

Should I use negative keywords? And if so, what is the best way to find good negative keywords?

Negative keywords are keywords you add to your paid search campaigns and/or ad groups to help the search engine determine what search queries you do not want you ads showing up for.  Utilizing the negative keyword features can help you target the most appropriate customers and cut down on costs.

For example, the negative keyword “price tag” would prevent your ads from showing up for search queries containing the word “price” AND “tag”.

My favorite way to research negative keyword would be to pull Google’s Search Query report. I look at the results for broad matched keywords (these are the actual user search queries.) If any of the search queries do not relate to my product I mark them. After I’ve gone through the list I go back to the keywords that were not a good fit and I pull out the essence of the search query that made it a negative.
For example I might mark this list of keywords as a poor fit for my office supply business:

• price tags
• retail stickers
• free color printer
• all cd covers
• how to make your own cd covers

The negative keywords I would add are: “tag”, “sticker”, “free”, “cd”, and “how to”.  Use the singular version as the negative if applicable.
In Google you can put negative keywords on different match types: broad, phrase or exact. You can also add negative keywords at the campaign, ad group and account level for Google.
Yahoo allows you to add excluded words at the ad group level and MSN allows you to add negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

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