Secrets to Paid Search Success Revealed, Part 2

Proper use of keyword match types is an extremely powerful lever in any paid search campaign. You can save tens of thousands of dollars in a single month (without losing volume) by applying match type strategies that show bias for exact match.

A surprisingly large percentage of paid search campaigns rely heavily on broad match. It's not uncommon that we analyze a campaign where the match type composition is 75 percent or more broad match. This almost always means that the advertiser is paying too much for the click; however, it presents a great opportunity to quickly create mass-scale efficiency.

Run Exact, Phrase and Broad Match Simultaneously

There are two key factors to successfully running these match types simultaneously:

• Match type specific ad groups: Yes, it's more work on the front end, but it always pays off. Let's say you have an ad group for "Cheap Vacation Deals" that contains 30 related keywords. Take this ad group and segment it into three separate ad groups -- one for each match type. This is going to provide a lot of scalability while setting up the foundation for efficient match type bidding.
  
• Tiered bidding: You've now set yourself up to execute a bidding strategy that will allow you to capture a less expensive exact match click whenever possible. Set your exact match bid as your highest bid. Then set your phrase match at 15 percent below exact, and broad match at 10 percent below phrase. By doing this, the engine should serve your exact match ad whenever possible, which will almost always deliver a lower CPC. Doing so across an entire account can create enormous efficiencies.

Here's a real word example of the waste that can be created when the above mentioned approach is not applied. We recently analyzed an account that had the keyword "self storage" set as broad and exact match within the same ad group. The bids were evenly set and the broad match version was being served over 95 percent of the time.

The problem: the CPC was $0.50 higher that its exact match counterpart and being served two positions lower on average. I don't like paying more for less. We quickly broke these out into dedicated ad groups and saw the less expensive exact match version serving more frequently and at the higher average position.

The exact match ad groups are going to be efficient machines in your account, but they might not always produce the volume you're looking for. Your phrase and broad match ad groups will help backfill your account and serve as a great resource for identifying new keywords.

Harvest Broad Match Ad Groups Frequently

Google AdWords provides a rich tool that will help you expand keywords within your account. By selecting a Campaign, then AdGroup, you'll be presented with the keywords that are associated with that AdGroup.

Select the See search terms... dropdown and select All. Doing this within your phrase and broad match ad groups will uncover specific keywords that triggered your ad, many of which you may not have set as exact match yet. It's a fantastic discovery tool.

Taking these keywords and adding them as an exact match will help ensure that the next time that keyword is used in a query, your more efficient exact match ad will serve.

Harvest this list every two weeks and migrate newly found keyword variations into your account as exact match. Doing so will create ongoing momentum for efficiency.

AdWords' See search terms... list will provide equally valuable insight into unintentional keywords that your ads might be serving on.

Let's go back to our "self storage" example. The See search terms... feature showed that the search term "storage rack" was triggering this advertiser's "self storage" ad.

These useless impressions drove his CTR down, decreasing quality score and negatively impacting the CPC. Placing irrelevant search terms into AdWords' negative keywords list will prevent this waste.

Negative phrase matching generally suppresses irrelevant impressions while proving just enough flexibility for new search terms to crop up that may not yet exist in the account. Just as you should routinely be adding search terms to your account, you should be omitting irrelevant terms.

A few other things to keep in mind:

• Plurals and misspellings: Remember that the engines consider vacation rental, vacation rentals, and vacation rntals (misspelled) as three distinct search terms. Include the singular, plural, and misspell in your campaigns. Diversify the match types in for the singular and plural, while sticking with exact match on the misspelling.
  
• Geo-modified: With Google Instant auto-suggesting geographically focused search terms more frequently, it's critical that if you have a geo-centric approach (furniture store in Atlanta, for example) that you're concatenating your head terms with geo modifiers, and running these on exact match. Relying on a broad match pick-up of furniture store will drive up your costs.

My colleague Kriag Guffey summed it up best when saying "the most effective way to control costs and drive efficiency is through Exact. The looser the match type, the more control you give up." Cheers to that.

Stay tuned for part three of this series where we'll explore the myths and realities of bidding.

Secrets to Paid Search Success Revealed, Part 1

While the world of paid search quickly began to formulate a strategy around bidding tactics, we saw early on that marketers could obtain better performance and greater profits from search by expanding their thinking two ways:

• By using all of the 30-plus search marketing tactics, instead of just bidding.
  
• By better aligning marketing with the process and strategy.

To illustrate the many pay-per-click (PPC) tactics that have proven successful in generating billions of dollars in revenue for our clients, we created a PPC tactics chart that serves as a guide for marketers looking to squeeze efficiency, blow-out volume, and create wildly profitable paid search campaigns.

(Click to enlarge)

We'll explore these tactics in detail in this four-part series. Let's begin with creative.

Why Ad Copy is Vital to Performance

Google, and all the search engines, want the best content to rise to the top. Best content is always that which is most relevant to users' queries.

Targeted creative, varied by keyword, is the most powerful set of tactics that can be employed.

Fourteen, fully 40 percent, of the best PPC tactics we've uncovered are creative, designed to make the ad more attractive to a searcher and more relevant to the search query.

Be Relevant

The most obvious tactic in creative is to use keyword insertion. Keyword insertion pushes the actual query used by the consumer into the title of the ad.

When users scan their search results, they instantly queue onto the search ads that have their search term in the title. In Google, the inserted keywords will also display in bold, making ads even more noticeable to the searcher.

Be Promotional

If you're selling a product, use price points and percentages off. Test both. Displaying them in the title improves click-through rate (CTR) and quality score, ultimately lowering your cost-per-click (CPC) and improving overall efficiency.

When a shopper sees a price like $79 in the ad, they are trained to know that this is an e-commerce site and they can buy the product there. That improves the click mix to include more shoppers and helps drive more conversions.

Lastly, always add a sense of urgency as the offer comes to a close. "Ends Tomorrow" always boosts CTR.

Grab Real Estate

There is a finite amount of space on the search results page, so grab as much of it as possible within the creative.

Google offers several features, such as Product Listing Ads, which when activated will display a plus box below the ad. When the plus box is clicked, product images, titles, and price points are displayed below the ad, thus occupying more space on the page.

Google Sitelinks are fantastic. This tactic allows advertisers to display up to four sub-links below the standard ad. You can control the copy that is displayed for these links, and the interior pages that users land on when clicking. We've seen CTRs improve by more than 30 percent when activating Sitelinks and have seen CPCs substantially decrease as well.

Go Granular

Setting up keywords into a large number of highly targeted ad groups helps performance immensely. This allows the creative to be tailored by ad group much more specifically, which leads to higher CTRs and greater efficiency and volume. Yes, this is time consuming, but the payoff is well worth it.

If, for example, you sell children's clothing, you want an ad group that is specific to only a handful of keywords related to children's clothing. Keep children's pajamas and children's jeans in separate ad groups or campaigns. This allows the creation of extremely targeted creative with specific price points, benefit-oriented statements about the products, and most importantly, dedicated landing pages.

Test Everything -- And Never Stop

With so many tactics in creative alone, testing is paramount to ongoing campaign improvements. Test the use of keyword insertion versus a highly targeted headline within a specific ad group. Test different price points.

It's amazing what consumers gravitate to. In one instance, we found "Save 75% Off" to outperform "Save 85% Off."

Wouldn't you rather save 85 percent? I would.

Perhaps consumers thought 85 percent was too good to be true. Who knows -- which is exactly why testing everything is imperative.

Don't ignore brand ads in the testing process either. Some of the largest efficiency wins can lie within brand campaign and ad groups.

Try "Official Site" in the headline next to the name of the brand. Through rigorous testing, many of our retail clients have found this to be golden.

The key to testing is to never stop. Don't be satisfied with the best performers. A methodical, structured, and ongoing process of challenging best performing creative with new and innovative tactics will yield continuous improvements in both efficiency and volume.

Best of luck in the ongoing quest to reach creative nirvana. Stay tuned for part two of the PPC Tactics series where we'll explore the power of keywords and match types.