Ad Copy testing can seem like a daunting task, especially when your account has multiple campaigns/ad groups and runs across multiple platforms. However, when you take a step back and really think about the goal behind Ad Copy testing, you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Let’s start at Step One: Why do we run Ad Copy tests?
The answer is easy â To find the optimal performing ads that drive the most conversions.
While all PPC marketers (I hope) realize that this is the end goal in Ad Copy testing, many PPC marketers get overwhelmed with the amount of ads in their accounts and get caught up with where to start and how to achieve the goal. It really does not need to be such a stressful task.
Though it would be great to be able to run ad copy tests across all campaigns/ad groups, the fact is there is just not enough time in the day to tackle it all.
Simply (Step Two) start by identifying your under-performing campaigns/ad groups (I recommend using a 60-90 day time frame, though depending on the volume of your account, a 30 or even 120 day time frame may be more appropriate) that if you optimized ad copy, could have a positive impact in performance. “Under-performing” can be various indicators, for example; over CPA/CPL /ROAS/ROI goals, low CTR, low conversions, etc.
Let’s look at an example of how to choose your under-performing campaigns for your Ad Copy testing. Below I’ve indicated the three campaigns that within this data set, I would chose to focus on when looking to run an ad copy test. One has the lowest CTR, one has the highest CPA and the last has the lowest conversions.
Now that I know where I want to focus my time and energy to improve performance through testing Ad Copy, Step Three is pulling an Ad Report for those campaigns (use the same time frame as you did when selecting under-performing campaigns).
Sort & filter the report by Campaign/Ad group. From there, create a new column with the formula CTR * Conversion Rate. By using this formula, you are not just analyzing ads based on CTR, which is not an indicator of conversions, or Conversion Rate, which is not an indicator of traffic. You are able to find the optimal pairing of CTR (the traffic indicator) and Conversion Rate (the conversion indicator). The one important thing to keep in mind with this formula is that it won’t work for evaluating all of your ads, namely those that have low/no conversions. In that instance, you would simply base your decisions off of CTR.
Once you have the new formula calculated for all ads, Step Four is ensuring there is statistical significance between ads. Here at SEER, we have an amazing developer, who has built us a proprietary internal tool to automatically determine statistical significance between the formula, CTR * Conversion Rate (screen shot below).
If you aren’t as lucky as we are, there are various Stat Checker tools out there you can use for the same thing. A few of our favorites are: Split Tester, SEO Book Split Tester and Super Split Tester . While you may not be able to check the statistical significance of the formula by itself, you can still use it to check Clicks/CTR or Conversions/Conversion rate to ensure the outcome of the formula is based on statistical significance.
95% is the ideal confidence level you want to reach to make a decision on the “winning ad.” However, if you find the ads consistently run at an 85-90% confidence level, it may indicate that the ads are very similar and thus will continue to perform in that manner, which indicates a new ad test is still ideal.
Now that you have your statistically significant winner in each ad group, you can confidentially pause the under-performing ad, and replace it with a new ad to test against the winner (Step Five). However, in order to ensure you are running a well structured ad test, it is critical to remember to isolate the ad test to one variable. For instance, when writing your new ad, keep all copy consistent with the winning ad, with the exception of 1 variable, perhaps the headline, value proposition, call to action, or even display variable. Here is an example of two ads that would adhere to ideal ad testing practices:
Notice the only variable I changed was the value proposition in Line 2 -> Free Shipping vs. Price Point. Testing just one variable at a time allows you to easily determine and understand why the ads are performing differently.
One of the best things about optimizing your ads and testing them using this strategy is you are able to get into a rotation. When your first test (let’s say the one in Step Two) is implemented and aggregating data, you can start the process all over again with a new round of campaigns to optimize and test new ads. If your first test was to optimize and test ads for under-performing campaigns, perhaps in round two of testing you should tackle your top converting campaigns, as you can always improve performance by tweaking aspects of your campaigns!
So, any time you want to optimize and test your ads follow the five simple steps for a stress-free testing strategy! Step One: Why do we run Ad Copy tests?
Step Two: Identify your under-performing campaigns/ad groups (or other set of factors to test a specific set of ads)
Step Three: Pull an Ad Report for those campaigns and add the CTR*Conversion Rate formula (where/when applicable)
Step Four: Ensure there is statistical significance between ads
Step Five: Pause the under-performing ad and replace it with a new ad to test against the winner (remembering to isolate just one variable for accurate testing)
Bounce rate can be an incredibly helpful metric, particularly when trying to not only drive more traffic to your website but trying to get more of that traffic to convert. However, it’s vitally important to understand what bounce rate is, how it differs from percent exit, and where you can potentially misunderstand the data.
So let’s start with a quick review. What is a bounced visit? In Google Analytics, a bounced visit is someone who views only one page on your site and leaves. In other words, whatever page he enters on is the only one he sees. Bounce rate is the number of bounced visits as a percentage of all visits. (It is important to note that some people/tools define a bounced visit differently â often in terms of a short amount of time spent on a page.) Additionally, in Google Analytics, when you’re looking at a Content Report, you’ll also see a metric called “% Exit.” What is % Exit? It represents the percent of visits that left your site from a particular page. How is Bounce Rate different than % Exit? To be considered in Bounce Rate, a person must view only one page and then leave but a person can view any number of pages (1 or 10 or 100) to be counted in % Exit.
Ok, here’s a scenario. Suppose you are looking at the Top Content pages for your website (the report that shows you the most viewed pages for your site in Google Analytics) and you see a line that looks like this:
Perhaps that line in your report is a step in your checkout process. Look at the bounce rate for this page â 100%!
This is where the important distinction between Bounce Rate and % Exit comes into play. What does this bounce rate of 100% mean? Literally it means of all the people who LANDED on this page left this site immediately. Because we’re looking at a Top Content Report, it does NOT mean 100% of the people who saw this page left. So how many people viewed this page & left without looking at anything else? Actually only 1 person. (You’d find this data by drilling into Entrance Sources or Keywords for this particular page.) If you want to know how many people come to your site, start the checkout process, get to this page and then decide to leave, you’d want to look at the % Exit (in this case 53.91%). While you might be worried that 54% of people who view this page decide not to complete the checkout process, at least you’re not thinking 100% of people who view this page leave.
If Bounce Rate is not always an appropriate metric to look at when viewing a Top Content Report, when would you be concerned about high bounce rates? Here are some good reports for Bounce Rate:
- Traffic Sources: For example, if you’re running a PPC campaign on Google and see that your Bounce Rate is much higher than your site average, you might be concerned that your landing pages are not resonating with your searchers.
- Keywords: Perhaps you find a keyword that you’ve been working to improve in organic rank but the Bounce Rate is high. Check for the landing pages for that term. Maybe your content is not quite relevant. Maybe you are lacking strong calls to action. Or maybe you should abandon trying to improve rankings for that term.
- Top Landing Pages: It may seem obvious but instead of looking at the Bounce Rate for a Top Content Report, I’d look at a Top Landing Pages report. The important distinction â with Top Landing Pages, by definition, you know a visit started on that page. Thus, if I saw a landing page with 100 entrances and a bounce rate of 100%, I would be concerned.
I hope this helps clarify the difference between Bounce Rate and % Exit. I’m a strong believer that your web analytics data is only as good as it is accurate. But more than that, your data is only as good as you can correctly understand and interpret it. Once you understand the data you’re seeing, it can be very powerful. At SEER, we believe in working to drive more traffic for our clients, but it’s important to know that this traffic is taking the actions you want on the site. Bounce Rate and % Exit are two of the metrics that can be extremely valuable in improving conversion rates.
When you are fortunate enough to be blessed by the Search Gods, you need to maximize that blessing, one strategy most of us probably don’t take full advantage of is blowing out the long tail keywords when we already are getting signals from the search engines that they like our site for head or short tail keywords.
First of all, I am assuming that in most cases the short tail keywords in most industries are much harder to rank well for than the long tail keywords.
If you are one of the lucky web sites to have rankings for shorter tail keywords, now is NOT the time to start patting yourself on the back, remove your hand from your back and open up the following tools and get ready to write.
Lets start with an example shorter tail keyword: “Best Shoes”
Best shoes returns 170 million pages in Google
Using the phrase match option on the Google Adwords Sandbox tool it shows that the keyword gets 74,000 searches a month, the next closest is best running shoes at 40,000.
In my research I selected this running shoe blog. The site ranked well on Google for “best shoes” – usually second page. That’s a nice short tail keyword with some decent volume as we saw above. Here are the steps to blowing out this opportunity!
STEP 1 – Go find those top of the tail keywords
Note: I don’t know the site owner so I had no access to analytics, but typically I’d say start looking for one and two word phrases in your analytics tools is a great way to uncover short tail words where you have rankings. If you want to do this for a competing site, feel free to try Google trends for websites and look under “also searched for”.
STEP 2 – Research Keywords
Using variations the root word “best shoes” & “Running Shoes” in Google suggest, Yahoo search assist, and Bing related search results to start the juices flowing on other words we could target.
What I like most about this method is the SPEED, it only takes a couple seconds to see other words associated with a given keyword, and at this point since we are evaluating long tail keywords we want to quickly see if there’s opportunity so we don’t waste hours just to find out that there is no real opportunity.
NOTE: DON’T FOOL YOURSELF, if the only reason why you are ranking for the short tail is because you have a domain that matches the keyword exactly, this strategy may not work as well.
STEP 3 – Assess The opportunity
There’s a huge long tail keyword opportunity with this running shoes blog … many of the words that came up in suggestion tools (previously in step 2) are not on the first 10 pages of search results for this blog. To save time from searching these manually and finding rankings, I suggest Rank Checker for Firefox.
Keeping in mind that this site is in the top 20-30 for the keywords “best running shoes” and “best shoes” on Google, it should be easier for it to rank well for words that include both these words in the long tail, yet the site is not.
STEP 4 – Check Rankings
Doing a little more digging I saw that there are a ton of words including the words “best” and “shoes” or “best” and “running shoes”. After entering that info into the rank checker (Step 3) I saw a LOT of zero rankings.
Look at the words below, a ton of phrases that use the root words “best and running” or “best and shoes” have rankings past page 10 for this blog:
best running shoes
best running shoes for women
best running shoes for flat feet
best running socks
best running sneakers
best running shoes for shin splints
best running shoes for bad knees
So the question is simple, why would Google allow this site to rank well for “best running shoes” and “best shoes” and not “best running shoes for women” or “best running shoes for shin splints”?
The answer is EASY.
This site does not have content geared toward these queries. They have been given the blessing by “the Google” to rank for shorter tail terms as mentioned before, hitting these longer tail terms is a content writing and internal linking project, that’s all.
But we are far from done.
STEP 5 – Use Google Insights to get rising search & long tail keywords
In the scenario above we were able to see that there were some low hanging fruit long tail words that we ignored the short tail on right? Well now we’ve got more.
Lets head on over to Google Insights to see what’s happening there:
Immediately I see that while the word “running shoes” is searched for a lot more than “best shoes” it looks like the upward momentum is with best shoes, right?
There’s a lot on that graph, making it harder to see trends, but it does look like some long tail keywords might be trending up while the shorter tail keyword “running shoes” is flat.
So lets get rid of the others and really zoom in on these two words. The upward momentum of these two keywords is with “best shoes” getting almost 3x the number of searches it did in 2004, while running shoes is basically flat to slightly up.
If you keep scrolling down the Google Insights graphs you’ll see rising searches:
Just scrolling down a bit I can draw some conclusions:
1 — Asics keywords are the breakout words gaining the most momentum (these are the rising searches for best running shoe)
2 — The non-branded term gaining the most momentum is trail running shoes (we’ll save that analysis for another day)
Step 6 – Dig DEEPER in Google Insights
If you are thinking your work here is done, and you should start writing Asics copy NOW to take advantage of the long tail, you are flat out wrong. Searching for “best running shoes” in Google Insights brought back Asics shoes and again lets look at the breakout terms that come back:
I see Asics Nimbus in there, I don’t know squat about Asics Nimbus, but it’s a rising search term. If I owned this blog or an e-commerce site I would definitely have some strategies in place to take advantage of this (umm remember sometimes your competitors give you all the keyword and rising searches insights you need into rising terms)
Major Takeaway: Your time is valuable, use Google Insights to help prioritize what you write, so you are always writing where there is a growing audience, with an increased interest, not on a topic where the audience (and thus the search volume) is decreasing.
Your work is STILL NOT DONE, yes proper keyword research is IMPORTANT and takes time, so lets keep going…
But this is enough for now next week we can go over my thought on how this impacts SEM & E-commerce sites. I can’t wait to wrap it up!
When you are fortunate enough to be blessed by the Search Gods, you need to maximize that blessing, one strategy most of us probably don’t take full advantage of is blowing out the long tail keywords when we already are getting signals from the search engines that they like our site for head or short tail keywords.
First of all, I am assuming that in most cases the short tail keywords in most industries are much harder to rank well for than the long tail keywords.
If you are one of the lucky web sites to have rankings for shorter tail keywords, now is NOT the time to start patting yourself on the back, remove your hand from your back and open up the following tools and get ready to write.
Lets start with an example shorter tail keyword: “Best Shoes”
Best shoes returns 170 million pages in Google
Using the phrase match option on the Google Adwords Sandbox tool it shows that the keyword gets 74,000 searches a month, the next closest is best running shoes at 40,000.
In my research I selected this running shoe blog. The site ranked well on Google for “best shoes” – usually second page. That’s a nice short tail keyword with some decent volume as we saw above. Here are the steps to blowing out this opportunity!
STEP 1 – Go find those top of the tail keywords
Note: I don’t know the site owner so I had no access to analytics, but typically I’d say start looking for one and two word phrases in your analytics tools is a great way to uncover short tail words where you have rankings. If you want to do this for a competing site, feel free to try Google trends for websites and look under “also searched for”.
STEP 2 – Research Keywords
Using variations the root word “best shoes” & “Running Shoes” in Google suggest, Yahoo search assist, and Bing related search results to start the juices flowing on other words we could target.
What I like most about this method is the SPEED, it only takes a couple seconds to see other words associated with a given keyword, and at this point since we are evaluating long tail keywords we want to quickly see if there’s opportunity so we don’t waste hours just to find out that there is no real opportunity.
NOTE: DON’T FOOL YOURSELF, if the only reason why you are ranking for the short tail is because you have a domain that matches the keyword exactly, this strategy may not work as well.
STEP 3 – Assess The opportunity
There’s a huge long tail keyword opportunity with this running shoes blog ⦠many of the words that came up in suggestion tools (previously in step 2) are not on the first 10 pages of search results for this blog. To save time from searching these manually and finding rankings, I suggest Rank Checker for Firefox.
Keeping in mind that this site is in the top 20-30 for the keywords “best running shoes” and “best shoes” on Google, it should be easier for it to rank well for words that include both these words in the long tail, yet the site is not.
STEP 4 – Check Rankings
Doing a little more digging I saw that there are a ton of words including the words “best” and “shoes” or “best” and “running shoes”. After entering that info into the rank checker (Step 3) I saw a LOT of zero rankings.
Look at the words below, a ton of phrases that use the root words “best and running” or “best and shoes” have rankings past page 10 for this blog:
best running shoes
best running shoes for women
best running shoes for flat feet
best running socks
best running sneakers
best running shoes for shin splints
best running shoes for bad knees
So the question is simple, why would Google allow this site to rank well for “best running shoes” and “best shoes” and not “best running shoes for women” or “best running shoes for shin splints”?
The answer is EASY.
This site does not have content geared toward these queries. They have been given the blessing by “the Google” to rank for shorter tail terms as mentioned before, hitting these longer tail terms is a content writing and internal linking project, that’s all.
But we are far from done.
STEP 5 – Use Google Insights to get rising search & long tail keywords
In the scenario above we were able to see that there were some low hanging fruit long tail words that we ignored the short tail on right? Well now we’ve got more.
Lets head on over to Google Insights to see what’s happening there:
Immediately I see that while the word “running shoes” is searched for a lot more than “best shoes” it looks like the upward momentum is with best shoes, right?
There’s a lot on that graph, making it harder to see trends, but it does look like some long tail keywords might be trending up while the shorter tail keyword “running shoes” is flat.
So lets get rid of the others and really zoom in on these two words. The upward momentum of these two keywords is with “best shoes” getting almost 3x the number of searches it did in 2004, while running shoes is basically flat to slightly up.
If you keep scrolling down the Google Insights graphs you’ll see rising searches:
Just scrolling down a bit I can draw some conclusions:
1 â Asics keywords are the breakout words gaining the most momentum (these are the rising searches for best running shoe)
2 â The non-branded term gaining the most momentum is trail running shoes (we’ll save that analysis for another day)
Step 6 – Dig DEEPER in Google Insights
If you are thinking your work here is done, and you should start writing Asics copy NOW to take advantage of the long tail, you are flat out wrong. Searching for “best running shoes” in Google Insights brought back Asics shoes and again lets look at the breakout terms that come back:
I see Asics Nimbus in there, I don’t know squat about Asics Nimbus, but it’s a rising search term. If I owned this blog or an e-commerce site I would definitely have some strategies in place to take advantage of this (umm remember sometimes your competitors give you all the keyword and rising searches insights you need into rising terms)
Major Takeaway: Your time is valuable, use Google Insights to help prioritize what you write, so you are always writing where there is a growing audience, with an increased interest, not on a topic where the audience (and thus the search volume) is decreasing.
Your work is STILL NOT DONE, yes proper keyword research is IMPORTANT and takes time, so lets keep going…
But this is enough for now next week we can go over my thought on how this impacts SEM & E-commerce sites. I can’t wait to wrap it up!
I’ve already shared once how to use being pet friendly to build links. the moral was that by just visiting a client’s office and seeing their dogs, exposed an opportunity to build QUALITY links to their site.
I’d like to give some pointers on how to put yourself in a position where content that becomes popular can come to you. Link ideas are all around you the question is how to do set yourself up to get those ideas coming to you on a regular basis? I think most of us aren’t being exposed to enough stimulus to get that creative spark.
Now that Digg has much better filtering / search capabilities you can get more topical link building sparks several times in a week. For instance let’s say I have a client in the beer goods industry, and I want to put myself in the position to use social votes to help filter to me content that is really worth looking at.
Go to Digg
Search for your keyword (in this case microbrew)
Looking left (below) you’ll see that in all of Digg there’s only been 3 articles dugg with the word microbrew in the last 7 days and only 8 in the last 30, well let me go click on the 8 to see if I can find something good.
Wow, 8 articles with only 1 digg each. Nothing too great has caught on.
Am I at a dead end? NO.
I left this example here to actually show how sometimes going too niche with any strategy will lead to you not getting a good result set, but don’t give up.
Lets start wider with the keyword “Beer” this time
In the last 7 days there have been 264 articles dugg containing beer and for the last 30 days there have been 1039 articles dugg containing beer, I can start playing with this result set, gotta be something good in here.
Do I have time to quickly look through 363 titles every month to develop a link building idea? I think so, but if even that’s too much for you how about filtering your search to articles with 1000 or more diggs, that now takes me to about 134, much more digestible for you lazy people, keep in mind though the ones with the fewer diggs are often good but just not promoted well, which gives you an opportunity to tweak a bit and submit your own flavor of it.
So here’s the ideas I came up with:
#1 Best beer themed Halloween costumes? With a step by step guide on how to make them yourself.
#2 A microbrewery could aggregate the funniest beer stories of the month and post to their blog or heck to a video blog with commentary about it, a la diggnation or two guys on beer.
#3 The beer map found here (link no longer active) definitely got me thinking of new ideas for map / state information and what other types of clients this would work for, maybe a wine client, or an organic foods client, sure they may not be as funny as beer, but could hit their niche hard.
Don’t forget to search Ning and Yahoo Groups for micro social sites to promote your content. Here are cigar groups on both Ning (no longer active) and Yahoo Groups.
Tip: You can pull a Ning’s groups updates via RSS into your feed reader, thus pushing that content to you, automatically and making it easier to be exposed to more ideas.
#4 I was reminded of some of the best condom ads post and thought, hmmm has someone done this for beer, or heck even a certain type of beer like Pabst?
#5 These two found on Digg got me thinking one is on Beer Robots, the other is how to make an office friendly beer fridge hmmm, a simple aggregation of the sneaky ways to have beer in the office or the best use of engineering to promote beer drinking could be interesting, I’m not saying they would get a ton of diggs but they will at least spark ideas to write on.
As I think about it, our client in the HR software business, could do a guest post / write up on an industry blog about the issues with having beer in the office and what companies should do to keep things safe if they have alcohol in the office.
Heck if a B2B toilet company can come up with this…
Lets evaluate the potential downside of spending 30 minutes on this.
Could these be crappy ideas that would never take off? Sure, but how long did it take for me to develop the ideas? Only 30 minutes. Is it worth bringing up a couple of these to our team to banter and improve on (this is why I like having our SEO team in one place). Why not.
Also if you go through your feed reader before you jump in the shower or drive to work you can use that time which is pretty unproductive to think of ideas, yes I am obsessive like that.
Sometimes you’ll uncover great ideas that have already been done, don’t be dismayed, the web is full of publishers doing the 09 version of someone’s great post in 07, or taking a successful post about skiing and going at it with a snowboarding or surfing twist.
Now you have to scale this, how do you do it? SIMPLE, you click on subscribe to these results, via RSS.
In that way and you’ll be alerted every time, something with BEER / snowboarding / Halloween / etc hits over 1,000 diggs â thats how you put yourself in the position to consistently think up blog content that people may find value in.
Tip: This strategy works great for other niche social media sites as well. (no longer active)
Last week, I was helping my colleague align our PPC strategy with the client’s big PR event on a national TV show. The experience was intense yet exciting at the same time. While preparing for the PR event, our objective was to ensure that we captured anyone searching for the brand or the brand’s industry online after seeing the airing. First, we created ad copy that referenced the show and featured the video of the taping prominently on our landing pages. We also, ensured that our budgets were set high enough to capture the online demand created by the national buzz.
All of this preparation got me thinking about the two big Cancer organizations that I’ve volunteered with: American Cancer Society (ACS) and Susan G. Komen. They have many events that are promoted throughout the year using different marketing channels including TV ads, radio ads and yesâ¦.PPC! In this quick analysis, I will compare how each organization integrates their PPC strategy with their offline strategy.
Let’s start with a little bit of a background. Based on Wikipedia, ACS was founded in 1913 and Komen was founded in 1982. Just based on longevity, you would think that the ACS brand is more well known than Komen. In our modern internet era we can actually research which organization has more brand recognition using Google Insights, as seen below.
Over the past year, the term “American Cancer Society” consistently has received higher web search volume. “Susan G. Komen” had a significant spike in search volume for the month of October because of their annual Pink Ball and the 3-day walk events. There are other factors that might contribute to the volume differences other than longevity, such as the number of events that ACS offers in a year, media involvement, news, etc. Looking at the search volume for the branded terms alone, ACS seems to be the leader in terms of brand recognition.
Let’s dive into the PPC integrations with other marketing venues.
1. ACS
Have you seen a TV ad by ACS that says that it is the official sponsor of birthdays? The first time I saw it, I was intrigued (again because I’ve volunteered with them before) and wanted to know more about it. What do they mean by the official sponsor of birthdays? I typed in different terms to search for more information on the “more birthdays” idea in Google. First, I typed in “celebrating more birthday cancer” and “more birthdays” in Google and this is what I saw:
First thing, I see is their organic results in top positions, but I don’t see PPC in this picture. They don’t have targeted ad copy for this term. Before jumping to conclusions, I searched the term again the next day and now they were showing ads with targeted messaging that integrates with their offline marketing. To their credit they also have ad copy with a strong call to action to “Download the Free ACS Birthday Kit”.
Based on this, I searched additional variation including, birthdays cancer society, more birthdays American cancer society, more birthdays, morebirthdays.com. Below are a couple ad variations I found:
A couple of hours later, I did the same thing and I didn’t see the ad copy (and yes I used ad preview tool). Instead, I saw this:
It is possible that ACS is running a test campaign for morebirthdays.com and they only run the campaigns at certain times using ad scheduling (maybe even geo target the campaigns) or they only run their campaign when TV ad airs. They may not even realize they are going dark, as they may be running out of budget. The good thing is that they have a strong organic presence (top ranked organic results). ACS is doing a decent job integrating offline media advertising with PPC. They are bidding on related terms and are running a few variations of their ad copy. However, they are falling short with visibility as their ads are showing up sporadically throughout the day.
I went to YouTube and searched for their official celebrating more birthday commercial. The information section on the right side includes very helpful information about the page but unfortunately no direct link to the homepage (which is important for a curious seeker). Additionally, after paying close attention to the TV ad, it actually shows the URL for MoreBirthday.com at the very end of the commercial which I don’t remember seeing for the first time so unless you do a little bit of research, you probably won’t get any information.
2. Let’s move on to Komen, I’ve been hearing its “Join 3 day walk” on the radio. When I typed: 3 day, the 3 day and 3 day walk on Google, Komen’s related websites were present in the organic as well as in paid search side. This is a couple versions of their ad copy:
What’s different between ACS and Komen? Aside from bidding on related terms and running more than 1 version of the ad copy, Komen 3 day walk ad copy runs all day, which is helpful and definitely gives them a stronger presence.
As I initially heard of the 3 day walk on the radio, someone who is driving, may not pay attention to the whole ad. Also, let’s face it, we sometimes can’t distinguish one cancer organization from the other. After listening to the Radio ad, one might think “was that ACS or Komen?” The only thing that they may remember is the phrase “3 day.” If the listener is curious enough, they would go to Google and type in that phrase to get more information.
In Conclusion:
The main take away is that in terms of integrating PPC strategy with other marketing tactics, Susan G. Komen has a better SEM presence by running their ad copy all day. ACS’s ad only comes up sporadically throughout the day. ACS may have other considerations that I am not aware of, such as budget, or integration with TV ad schedule for not running their Morebirthdays PPC campaign all day. By not having 100% visibility ACS may be missing out opportunity.
When you check all of your carefully selected and researched keywords, the results put a smile on your face because they are in the top spots in each of the search engines. You then look at your site traffic numbers for these keywords, and they are higher than ever. Then you scratch your head and ask, “Why are conversions so low?” Take a breath: the answer can be found in your Google Analytics data.
The keywords you’ve chosen for your site were selected because, in theory, they should bring you the highest ROI from search. Some of these keywords may not be performing as you expected, which is why you need to analyze their performance against the rest of your site. There are several other tools and methods that can be used, which Avinash Kaushik lays out nicely here, but for this example, we will be relying on Google Analytics for the quick and skinny method to improve keyword conversion rates.
1. Site Bounce & Conversion Rates by Keywords
The first step involves understanding your overall site bounce and conversion rates from keywords. To do this, go to Traffic Sources –> Keywords and flip back and forth between the Site Usage tab and the Goal Conversion tab. You will get an idea of overall keyword bounce and conversions rates. Take a look at the site-wide bounce and conversion rates and note them.
The example below shows data from a site’s top 10 visited keywords, along with bounce and conversion rates. We’ll use these metrics for our sample analysis:
Average Bounce Rate: 44.09%
Average Conversion Rate: 1.52%
2. Keyword-Grouped Bounce & Conversion Rates
Use your themed keyword groups to determine which groups of keywords to analyze together, and type the general term into the Filter Keyword box to group the similar terms. The example below represents a sample of similar terms that are under performing compared to site-wide metrics:
Average Bounce Rate: 65.12%
Average Conversion Rate: 0.14%
Taking a look at the bounce rates in conjunction with conversion rates is a good indicator that visitors are NOT finding what they are looking for.
3. Landing Page Analysis
Take a look at the landing pages for these keywords, and ask yourself these following questions:
Is the page relevant to the keyword?
Is the page too cluttered?
Is the call to action obvious?
If you answered yes, no, yes, then STOP HERE â you probably chose the wrong keywords. If, however, you answered the opposite to any of those questions, continue reading.
It’s now time to dig deeper into where your visitors are going from the pages that are bouncing and not leading to conversions.
4. Site Overlay
Although this feature can be a little buggy, Site Overlay is a great, free way to analyze where your visitors are going after landing on a page.
In order to utilize Site Overlay, go to the Content –> Top Content and find and click on the landing page from the keywords you are analyzing. You will then be in Content Detail for your landing page. At the bottom right, look for Click Patterns and click on the link that says Site Overlay. This will take you directly to the page you want to analyze.
From here you can see where visitors are navigating. If it’s not where you want them to go (i.e. next step to purchase, shopping cart, order services form), they don’t know where to go, OR your page is not relevant to what they are looking for. Look at the click percentage to the home page of your site and the search box. If they seem to be the highest percentages, there’s a good chance your visitors just don’t know what to do.
5. Test Landing Page Options and Measure the Results
Don’t go abandoning your nicely researched keywords just yet. Use Google Website Optimizer to test out different landing page options: Maybe the call to action isn’t obvious enough for your visitors. Maybe you need more relevant content. Maybe there are too many items on a page.
Utilize Google Website Optimizer to your advantage in order to determine whether you have the right keywords or not. You can do A/B or Multivariate testing. To understand which test is right for your page, take the tour.
The final piece of advice is to measure your results. Make wise decisions based on numbers, not a hunch. Then you will know for sure whether you chose the right keywords for your site.
In Summation
Analyzing your keywords according to bounce and conversion rates is an important step in making the right decision on where to spend your precious time and efforts. Be sure you’ve done everything you can to your landing page and measure the results before abandoning your keywords.
And remember: These tools are free; Google wants you to succeed!
