Technology
Basis Platform
Advertising Operating System
Communication Portal
Intelligent Collaboration
All Channel Activation
Activate Media on Every Channel
Consulting
Resources
This infographic provides an overview of running through a root cause analysis on your SEM program, plus touches on two other types of audits you’ll want to keep in mind when assessing and solving PPC performance troubles.
While auditing poor performance isn’t anyone’s dream job, it’s simply a requirement for SEM managers–and can really make a big difference if caught early and addressed correctly. Regular audits are a healthy part of program maintenance.
Sometimes an issue is truly from a “root cause”: business changes, landing page issues, competition in the market, or culturally irrelevant keywords. However, often you’ll find more holistic drops that can be better explained by dimensions or segments that may just need to be adjusted with bid modifiers. Beyond that, sometimes your entire optimization strategy may be built on incomplete data or metrics, or just missing a key step in the customer journey that could drive value.
Addressing PPC issues isn’t fun, but this infographic can help you look into a few elements. However, you can learn even more about all of these topics in our new eBook: Advanced PPC Auditing Guide: Determining Root Causes, Bleeding Dimensions, and Optimization Strategy.
To download this infographic on solving PPC performance issues, click here. The full eBook is also available, digging into all aspects of the infographic. Alternatively, if you’d like to talk to our team about how to improve performance on some dimensions, or get more out of the metrics you’re optimizing towards–get in touch here.
In 2019, businesses are investing more in PPC performance marketing than ever before. Advertisers must constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve Adwords performance if they want to stay ahead of the growing competition. There are a lot of changes advertisers can make to improve performance and an equal number of ways to hurt it. PPC managers can no longer afford to experiment with changes and learn from trial and error. They need to invest in strategies that optimize while avoiding performance issues altogether. Automated PPC bidding technology is the key. Here's why.
Quality data is essential if you want to develop an effective optimization strategy, create accurate forecasts, and make the most of key insights to improve visibility and campaign performance. The better the quality of data you’re able to access and analyze, the more opportunities you’ll have to boost conversions, beat out the competition, and drive revenue from your ads.
One of the biggest reasons for missed goals in PPC performance marketing is low-quality data. Even if you’re using the most advanced optimization techniques, low-quality data can drive misguided decisions, causing PPC performance to fall short of expectations.
Advanced bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to address this issue by analyzing a unified data set to make profitable bidding decisions. On the basic level, Google’s bid automation technology utilizes bid landscapes, historical performance, and other quality data to drive performance-enhancing insights. Advanced PPC automated bidding tools like QuanticMind by Centro can also consider additional categories of business data, such as offline data from call centers or CRM platforms, data from the web and mobile tracking solutions, inventory systems that track supply constraints, and other contextual data.
By taking advantage of all relevant categories of data, bid optimization technology is able to make informed changes to achieve peak performance. If you rely on a manual strategy or bidding solution that doesn’t capture and leverage all critical data, then you may have some inherent performance issues as well as missed opportunities.
Fully utilizing a unified data set that includes deep funnel metrics will unlock insights into where your prospects are in the sales funnel when you reach them. It can also help you understand which steps in the customer journey are most valuable for your advertising goals. Certain milestones of the customer journey can serve to predict whether a click will lead to a sale, and how much revenue that sale will return. Bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to make bidding decisions with driving revenue in mind.
Manual bidding is no longer a default strategy in PPC performance marketing. Even for smaller accounts with just a few campaigns and ad groups, there are simply too many important factors that impact bidding decisions to be handled manually, including:
These factors are, of course, always changing. In order for PPC managers to avoid performance issues from under or overbidding, they need to constantly recalculate and update their strategy as the bid landscape and other factors change.
Bid optimization technology has advanced algorithms and data processing capabilities that can accurately calculate the best CPC to maximize campaign performance. Through automation, it’s also able to make constant changes to your bids based on the latest data insights. When you make full use of bid automation technology, it’s possible to avoid performance issues that come from outdated or sub-optimum bidding decisions.
Google’s automated bidding features respond to real-time data signals to make changes to your bids on variables such as device, language, operating system, and performance. QuanticMind by Centro can also optimize bids when data is scarce, for example in the case of long-tail keywords with few conversions. The software uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to estimate the value of long-tail keywords/product groups.
Here’s a breakdown of the data and process used to calculate CPC and minimize wasted ad spend for PPC:
If you’re having performance issues, it could be because you’re optimizing towards the wrong metric. Every business has unique goals they want to prioritize when optimizing their PPC campaigns. In order to measure performance towards a goal, they need to choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Most PPC marketers rely on so-called “vanity metrics” such as impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, and conversions to measure success. But they often fall short of painting a full picture of how your ads are helping your business achieve your goals.
For example, say your main goal is to achieve a monthly return on ad spend (ROAS) of 150%. In this case, you’d want to include revenue as an important KPI to monitor. It would also inform your bidding strategy, as you’d want to bid more on keywords that generate more revenue and less on keywords that generate less revenue. Bid optimization technology can prevent PPC performance issues that arise from targeting the wrong KPIs. With Google Ads, you can select the right bidding strategy based on specific business goals, such as:
Automated bidding automatically considers all-important KPIs for your business goals when making bidding decisions. Third-party bid automation tools can also help you target a wider range of goals based on a hybrid mix of KPIs, such as maximizing profit margin. This ensures you avoid performance issues from optimizing towards metrics that don’t fully reflect your goals.
Bid adjustments are opportunities to optimize targeting by increasing or decreasing bids in certain situations. You can create bid adjustments based on factors like:
You can also make bid adjustments for certain audiences, such as remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) or in-market audiences. It’s common for account managers to make bid adjustments manually in PPC performance marketing. This, though, can inadvertently lead to some efficiency and performance issues. A marketer could, for instance, increase bids for mobile devices by 15% because they know conversions are higher on mobile devices. But what if a 10% bid adjustment could achieve the same results? Or what if targeting in-market audiences (who are often searching from mobile anyway) yields better results than a mobile bid adjustment?
The only way to ensure your bids are optimum is through experimentation. But if you automate bid adjustments, machine learning technology can discover the ideal bid changes for you. It can also make constant adjustments to bids to keep up with market fluctuations. The ability to make thousands of granular bid adjustments at scale can significantly reduce wasted ad spend and improve campaign performance overall.
Contrary to popular belief, bid automation technology can be used for a lot more than optimizing keyword bids. Top-of-the-line tools have many features to help you improve Adwords performance, such as advanced reporting and forecasting capabilities.
Google Ads offers internal forecasting features from Keyword Planner so you can see how different keyword targeting and max CPC affect long-term performance. Bid optimization technology can also forecast future performance based on important factors like bidding strategy, historical performance, seasonality, bid landscape, and more.
Accurate, data-fueled forecasting is important if you want to improve Adwords performance and avoid efficiency issues. Most marketers create an initial forecast to secure a budget and plan how to spend it. But as they make changes to their bid policies and targeting strategy down the road, the forecast becomes inaccurate. And even if they don’t make changes, the competitive landscape will shift. So, having an automated, up-to-date forecast at all times is incredibly valuable to avoid performance issues. Any changes you make to your account that inadvertently hurts performance will be instantly visible with forecasting. The forecasting feature available within QuanticMind by Centro allows users to view the predicted performance of bid policies up to 100 days into the future.
It’s primarily the job of a PPC account manager to ensure that campaign performance keeps up with forecasted projections. If your CPA or other performance metrics vary widely from expectations, then an error in your account or data could be the problem.
Whenever an anomaly occurs, PPC account managers need to act quickly to pause problem campaigns and address the issue before it causes too much damage. This task becomes a problem with PPC automated bidding because bidding algorithms are constantly making changes. They also calculate bids using much larger datasets than what account managers using manual bidding would normally handle.
But there are certain features you can use to automatically detect anomalies and minimize their impact on PPC performance. Google scripts are one option you can use to automate this process. For example, there are scripts that can regularly scan your account performance and automatically email the account manager if statistics vary too far from projections. There are also scripts you can use to automatically pause problem campaigns or ad groups, giving PPC managers time to address the issue.
Effective anomaly detection also involves assessing the quality of low fidelity data and making necessary changes to avoid performance issues based on it. For the most part, more data input is always good, unless it’s low-quality data that keeps performance below peak potential and wastes significant ad spend. Often these data quality issues are hidden in the sub-segments of relevant data, making it difficult for marketers to discover by hand. Advanced bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to address this issue.
QuanticMind by Centro includes an array of anomaly detection techniques to identify potential data issues. In a complex automated bidding process, anomaly detection is the last check before new bid calculations are pushed to publishers:
It monitors all key metrics, including cost, revenue, clicks, CPC, and more, then compares their daily performance to forecasted expectations. If results vary significantly, the tool automatically prevents bidding from being updated from deviant data and sends out an alert for account managers. Once the potential data issue is solved, bidding is resumed.
Bid optimization technology is a powerful tool for improving Adwords performance. But it also has important features that help advertisers avoid problems with their accounts and campaigns. Manually diagnosing PPC performance issues is time-consuming, and account managers may never fully identify the extent of the issues. That’s just one of many reasons why bid automation tools are essential for succeeding with SEM.
Dynamic Search Ads in Google Ads have long been a powerful digital tool to expand the reach of an advertising program and discover new, relevant search keywords. Still, they often remain underutilized and misunderstood. Every advertiser should consider Dynamic Search Ads as a part of their advertising arsenal. Here’s a guide on the what, why, and how to maximize the potential of these keyword-less campaigns.
First, what are Dynamic Search Ads, abbreviated as DSAs? Since October 2011, DSAs have allowed paid search advertisers to target customers without having keywords. Google’s web crawling technology indexes your website, much like it does to produce search results, and Google automatically creates an ad when a search is relevant to the content of your website. If that sounds like magic, that’s because it is. Magic in the form of dynamic ad creation. DSAs utilize the very same technology that makes Google a valuable search engine in the first place; it’s ability to index websites and direct search results to relevant content.
DSAs fit the following framework:
[dynamically generated headline]
Yourwebsite.com
Ad description
The ad headline that is shown when a DSA appears on the search results page is dynamically created from Google. The information that populates a DSA headline is pulled directly from the site. You still need to write a description line for the ad, but that is the only thing that can be adjusted. As you can imagine, having a specific and tailored headline that is about the actual product searched is a best practice, and is something that DSAs can help you achieve.
Since DSAs do not have keywords, bids are applied at the ad target level, called dynamic ad targets. DSAs use content from your website to target your ads to searches. There are a variety of targeting options:
Category - Sets of landing pages organized by theme. You decide which sets of pages to target.
Page Content - Descriptive content on the page contains a certain word or phrase.
Page Title - The title of the page contains a certain word or phrase.
URL - The page URL contains this word or phrase.
Each DSA campaign has one or more ad targets, and ad targets can be defined as any combination of the targeting options. Ad targets are typically broadly defined to help increase incremental search traffic.
Ad target bids otherwise function the same as a keyword bid, and DSA campaigns and ad groups have the same bid adjustments available (device, location, etc) as any keyword-based object.
A critical component to achieving success with DSAs is signaling when not to show ads. This can be managed via exclusions and negative keywords.
Exclusions - Exclusions come in two forms, the exclusion of a category, and the exclusion of specific webpages. When your website contains pages that you do not want to direct traffic to, those pages should be excluded. A common example of this is to exclude pages that contain the words ‘sold out’ to prevent customers from seeing ads for products with no inventory.
Negatives - Negative keywords can be added to DSAs just like with any other campaign. Despite DSAs having no keywords, negatives will prevent ads from showing in the case that a search query contains the negative keyword. For example, add ‘used’ as a negative keyword for a campaign dedicated to new car sales.
Create a new DSA campaign with a single ad group. Set a single ad target that targets webpages containing your homepage URL. This ensures content across your entire website is contributing to ad creation and potentially showing for relevant search results. Next, include exclusions and negatives that overlap with content for which you already have keyword campaigns. From there, get more granular, try creating more precise advertising targets, and review the search queries generating traffic and conversions for new opportunities to expand your keywords.
DSA setup is easy, but to have continued success advertisers should routinely reassess their exclusions and negatives to ensure not only that traffic is flowing to the appropriate pages on their site, but also that the traffic is relevant. The other major benefit of DSA campaigns is the opportunity to generate site traffic that would not have been generated via your existing list of keywords.
Most advertisers know what keywords contribute to the majority of site traffic, but reviewing search queries that lead customers to your site via a DSA campaign could help you discover valuable alternative search terms you can then add as keywords. This process should be performed periodically over time to generate additional program growth.
Bing Ads offers DSAs as well and they function the same as with Google Ads. Bing explicitly recommends duplicating your Google Ads DSA campaigns in Bing, which tells you just how functionally identical they are to Google. The same successful practices you administer on Google are equally applicable to Bing.
What industries or verticals stand to benefit the most from DSAs? Short answer, eCommerce, and online retailers. Reason being that DSAs will segment your website content into specific categories, such as product categories, to trigger highly relevant ads and landing pages. Advertisers who have a large catalog of webpages and products are ideal users of DSAs and will save time from needing to specify ad text and landing pages for every product.
Pros
Cons
The good far outweighs the bad, and bad is an overstatement, there really is no bad. The diminished control found using DSAs can be mitigated with a comprehensive set of traditional keyword campaigns. The best search programs are using DSAs in addition to keyword-driven text ads.
DSAs are a valuable ad type that every advertiser should consider. When managed properly, including thorough reviews of exclusions and negatives, DSAs offer a low-risk way to boost search traffic that may otherwise have gone untouched.
~
To learn more about how you can create better, higher-performing ads that drive peak performance, connect with our digital media experts today.
Whether your media budget is big or small, it’s always worthwhile to review how efficiently your campaigns are spending media dollars.
For vetted tips on how to spend more effectively, we turn to Centro’s expert, Laura Perritte. As National VP of Client and Media Services, Laura is a pro when it comes to maximizing client investments and pushing working media to the max.
Listen in, as she dishes on how to get scrappy by using data sources, personalizing creative messaging, developing custom audiences, considering geography, executing across social channels, and more! Don’t miss out on these tips from the field—with so many media options to choose from, assessing whether you’re getting the best bang for your buck is now more important than ever.
There are about 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, and that number continues to rise daily. That statistic alone showcases the reach that social media has when it comes to digital marketing. Social media marketing allows companies to connect more closely with their clients and customers, whether it’s through wide-reaching Facebook or influencer-dominated Instagram. Now is the time to utilize the platforms that matter!
When it comes to B2B marketing, however, LinkedIn reigns supreme. The professional networking site remains the most used social media platform by Fortune 500 companies. But it’s not limited to high-profile company executives—millennials are flocking to the site as well. Out of over 590 million current LinkedIn users, 87 million are millennials.
How can you use LinkedIn to your advantage? Read on to find out.
LinkedIn users are looking for valuable content filled with insider knowledge, so it’s important to inform and educate rather than promote. Target your content to what your audience and connections want to see, because even sponsored content will appear organically in their newsfeeds. Tell an engaging story and make sure to include videos and photos in posts—62% of LinkedIn members interacted with platform content because they found it educational or informative.
Don’t be a faceless brand! Show your followers that your company has a team of real people behind it. Despite the professional landscape, LinkedIn is still a great place to tell stories and show your followers that you’re more than just a product or service provider. Not every post has to be business oriented—it’s also worthwhile to highlight company values, share thought leadership content, and celebrate employees.
Centro’s Basis now has an API integration with LinkedIn, making it even easier to advertise on the platform. Basis pulls daily delivery, performance, and spend data from LinkedIn directly into its dashboard. This eliminates the need for additional CSVs and spreadsheets to be manually downloaded from LinkedIn and uploaded into Basis.
Basis rationalizes delivery data from major ad servers, various social and search vendors, and its integrated demand-side platform (DSP). The LinkedIn integration drives productivity for media professionals by:
Basis improves revenue margins, controls costs associated with technology platforms, and lifts team productivity by automating the most manual and redundant tasks in digital media buying and operations. Don’t wait—visit our site to learn more.
Thought leaders, assemble! We recently hosted a roundtable discussion with the Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG). The CIAG is aimed at gathering valuable input from thought leaders to help shape the future of advertising technology and services. Read on for key takeaways:
Want to become priceless to your agency executive? Become a T-shaped person.
We recently asked the Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG) what they look for when hiring and promoting within their teams. There was one common theme from executives when it comes to staffing for the success of a business: Finding T-shaped people is critical.
T-Shaped People? What?
Also known as generalized specialists, T-shaped people have a thin slice of a broad set of skills, but can also go deep on one or two specific areas. Agency executives are looking for this type of person to work on their most important accounts—someone who brings a deep expertise to a situation, but also understands enough context to make smart decisions.
In our industry, this could look like an analytics expert with a solid base of the other aspects of digital media:
Context Is King
In our example above, even the best analytical mind still needs context about the strategy and goals of a campaign—we work in a complicated industry!
Imagine hiring Paul DePodesta, the brain behind Moneyball, and asking him to analyze your campaign. Sure, he could do some amazing work right off the bat (baseball pun intended), but to fully unlock the genius of DePodesta, you’d have to share context with him. What is the KPI? What are the benchmarks? Why did you choose this media mix? What’s the creative call-to-action? What does the landing page look like? You get the idea.
Context is someone’s breadth of knowledge about a subject. Building context helps you move faster, catch critical nuances, and make better decisions. Adding just a little context also increases the impact of your expertise exponentially.
How to Become a Jack of All Trades, Master of One
The first step is recognizing where you are.
If you have the breadth and context, begin to think about where you’d like to specialize. Good places to start your search are passions and industry trends. Are you already a political junkie? Specialize in political advertising. Do you recognize the importance of data science in media? Look into continuing education programs or certifications to deepen your knowledge.
If you are already an expert in an area, but need the context, start talking to people. Set up coffee chats and be curious about their roles. Build connections, then ask to work on small projects with those teams to get a working knowledge of the landscape.
Centro’s software, services, and resources can quickly help you get what you’re missing, whether that’s depth or breadth. Check out Centro Institute to take advantage of our educational resources!
Throughout the past few years, as a relentless wave of new digital technologies continue to push the boundaries of how brands market their services, PPC advertising has become the most effective tool in a marketer’s arsenal for reaching potential customers at the right moment across multiple channels and devices. A dynamic, successful paid search campaign has the power to generate profit faster than any other traditional marketing outlet being utilized today.
The caveat, though, is that it requires a serious amount of hard work to run and constantly monitor. With so many nuanced opportunities to capitalize on and so many industry developments to stay abreast of, one of the most valuable skills to develop as you grow your career is performing regular PPC program audits across Google Ads, Bing, and Google Analytics et al. It’s a lamentable fact that whether you’ve just inherited PPC accounts at a new company or you’ve been running a single program for an extended period, at some point you’ll experience performance that is somewhat less than stellar and the causes could be numerous. A comprehensive audit will help you understand what is happening throughout your entire paid search program, surface areas that can be optimized more rigorously, and uncover any keywords or campaigns that are simply not moving the needle in your favor.
If your current PPC program is dipping below expected ROI targets the good news is that no account is perfect. This, hopefully, shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. Unexpected declines in PPC performance are perfectly normal and are not cause for alarm just as long as you know what actions to employ to right the metaphorical ship.
The bad news? Pretty much every aspect of your campaigns can have detrimental effects on your business outcomes. Out of the gate you’ll want to ask yourself these questions: Am I using the right keywords? Are my landing pages and ad copy optimized? Have we made any business model changes that could affect ROAS? Could seasonality be a factor?
In our newly released advanced PPC auditing guide, we cover what it takes to determine root causes, identify poorly performing dimensions, and then ensure you’re optimizing to the right metrics. In what can be viewed as an overwhelming process, we break down how to move through the stages into handy, bite-sized snippets that can quickly empower PPC practitioners like you to get back to driving improved advertising investments. #smalldetails #biggains.
To give you a taster of the gold that can be found inside, here we offer a short overview of the troubleshooting steps you need to take to turn your failing PPC program around.
From the outset, the process of rectifying poor PPC performance needs to be measured and systematic. Take a wrong turn at the beginning and you could end up wasting valuable time and resources taking a deep dive into something irrelevant. To begin, you’ll need to identify the root cause of the issue that is skewing your numbers. Your program may well contain hundreds of campaigns, thousands of ad groups, and tens of thousands of keywords or product groups. With so many potential rabbit holes to go down, you might be wondering where on earth you start.
The answer lies in the fact that you’ll want to treat your analysis like you would your PPC account structure. First, identify poorly performing accounts, followed by campaigns, ad groups, and finally keywords and product groups. In most scenarios, you’ll find that your campaign structure adheres to some variation of the 80/20 rule; 80% of spend will come from 20% of campaigns. It goes without saying that it’s not the best use of your time to spend hours exploring poor PPC performance in campaigns that only form small segments of your total spend. Sort them by descending order of dollars spent and handpick those that are not meeting desired levels of expectation. Filtering out these campaigns early on will set you on the right path to diagnosing the underlying problems that are hampering your paid search performance.
The second part of our PPC auditing guide concerns the tricky business of dimensional analysis. Via part one you should have (hopefully) pinpointed the source(s) of your performance deficiencies, or, alternatively, you may well have discovered that results were dropping everywhere and that includes numerous dimensions.
“What does this guy mean by dimensions?” I hear you ask. Good question. Whenever a user clicks on an ad, the click will come from one of three devices – a computer, a phone, or a tablet. Said click will always come from a dedicated location and happen at a specific time of the day. These categories of device, location, and time of day are subsets of all possible dimensions from where clicks can originate. Naturally, certain categories within dimensions have more weight than others. Figuring out which one is responsible for your poor PPC performance can take a substantial amount of time if you let it, but it’s better to use a methodical strategy to uncover and fix the problem. You can do this by:
1. Following any changes you recently made to your PPC optimization strategy.
2. Taking a look at overall performance for your most important dimension.
3. Flagging and tracking your dimensions through custom dashboards and internal alerts.
Once you have a hunch about which dimension might be dropping PPC performance, be sure to explore the data. Set a pre-post period to visualize the information and get a pulse on what’s actually going on. Ultimately, understanding performance by dimensions is a crucial component of your PPC program audit as it helps to surface areas of immediate opportunity that can promptly get you back on track.
If your PPC performance analysis isn’t leading to actionable insights through investigations into simple root causes and dimensional analyses, the issue might be bigger than you first anticipated – your PPC bidding strategy might be focused on the wrong optimization metrics altogether.
So, what is an optimization metric?
Glad you asked. In short, it is a measurement you use in order to determine what bid you would like to place on a keyword, which bid adjustment you would place on a device, etc. PPC optimizations will always, to some degree, be related to your business goals. To give you a tangible example, if you’re looking to achieve a monthly ROAS of 150%, revenue should be factored into your optimization metric – ie. you would increase bids on keywords generating more revenue and decrease bids on keywords generating less revenue. Some examples of optimization metrics to use include:
- Low-Funnel Metrics – revenue and conversions
- Hybrid Metrics – a mix of high-funnel and low-funnel metrics
- Lifetime Value Metrics
Whatever type of metric you optimize toward is, ultimately, dependent on the wealth of data you have at your fingertips, what your click to conversion funnel looks like, the behavior of your users, and a great many more factors. The questions to ask of yourself are:
- What is my overall business goal? (Profit Maximization, CPA, Brand Presence, etc.)
- Do I have enough data directly related to my business goal that I can optimize towards?
Finding answers around these themes will guide you in the direction of the best optimization metric you can utilize to ensure you are anticipating and executing best PPC advertising investments.
Our comprehensive PPC auditing guide presents an in-depth approach to reviewing and identifying areas in your program responsible for poor paid search performance. It’s vitally important to the success of your marketing efforts that you don’t let your accounts simply cruise on autopilot as there’s always more you can be doing to improve campaign efficiency. Follow the systematic steps we outlined in our guide, though, and it’s possible to fix the most problematic performance issues first. Getting better results with less time investment makes it possible to focus on other areas of opportunity that can really drive your business forward.
Our mission is to improve the lives of the people working in this industry. And when we first launched Basis—our comprehensive platform that converges digital media planning, buying, operations, campaign analytics, business intelligence, and billing reconciliation—we did it with media professionals in mind.
Although Basis has been on the market for less than two years, its swift adoption shows that advertisers agree with our emphasis on automation. Consider some of the features and updates we rolled out in just the past few months:
We’re not done yet! Stay tuned as we release new tools and options for forecasting, audience targeting, campaign optimization, social advertising, billing reconciliation, and moreover the next couple of months.
Itching to see—or hear—more? Learn more about the audio advertising opportunity with Basis.
There are lots of ways to improve PPC campaign performance by changing your keyword targeting strategy. You could get results by optimizing bids and audience targeting for broad match search terms with a high search volume. But it’s also possible to attract more traffic and optimize your ad spend by targeting long-tail keywords in Adwords.
Here’s everything you need to know about using long-tail keywords effectively to improve PPC performance.
Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases used to search for something very specific on the web. They usually contain at least three keyword terms derived from a head term. For example, a broad search term could be “marketing automation.” A long-tail keyword could be “marketing automation for Adwords PPC.”
Most paid search advertisers focus only on targeting broad search terms. But a huge portion of Google searches are long-tail queries. In fact, 70% of search traffic comes from highly specific four to six-word phrases:
Targeting long-tail keywords is a very popular strategy for organic search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers tailor their content creation efforts to optimize for long keyword phrases.
Marketers who invest in both SEO and PPC often balance their long-tail targeting efforts by targeting competitive head terms with paid ads. This is a worthwhile strategy, but completely overlooks the opportunity long-tail keywords offer for PPC targeting and optimization.
Long-tail keywords are valuable in PPC for several reasons:
Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases, and end up having lower search volume as a result. Lots of people shopping online will search for the head term “wireless router.” Very few will search for “wireless router with USB 3.0.” Because long-tail phrases have a lower search volume, most PPC advertisers won’t bother to target them. So, if you do take the time to identify and target relevant long-tail keywords, you’ll have much less competition to rank in search results.
Google Ads calculates cost-per-click (CPC) for a keyword-based on demand. Highly competitive keywords with a high search volume will have a high CPC, while less competitive keywords will have a lower CPC. Targeting keywords with lower CPC and competition means you won’t have to pay a premium price to get your ads to rank highly. This also frees up more of your budget to pursue other advertising initiatives.
Long-tail keywords are highly targeted and specific, suggesting a searcher is close to the point of purchase. Look at the “wireless router” vs “wireless router with USB 3.0” example again. People who search for “wireless router” are likely hoping to learn more about the technology, or are at the beginning stages of understanding what kind of wireless router they want to buy. Someone who searches for “wireless router with USB 3.0” has already done their research. They know specifically what kind of router they want and are likely ready to make a purchase.
Targeting long-tail keywords is also an opportunity to optimize for voice search. Voice search has changed the kind of search queries people use to find the products and information they need. Several research studies have shown that voice search queries are significantly longer than text search:
Considering that 20% of all Google mobile queries are voice search, it’s already a valuable strategy to optimize for.
The key to success is finding keywords that imply high purchase intent. Sticking with the wireless routers example: with your marketing content, you can target top-of-the-funnel keywords like: “will a new wireless router improve internet speed?”
These long-tail keywords suggest searchers are just starting to learn about marketing automation and aren’t ready to buy yet. If you want to drive high ROI from your PPC ads, then you’ll target bottom-of-the-funnel keywords like: “wireless router with parental controls and time restriction”.
Always consider searcher intent when researching long-tail keywords. Some keywords are great to target for SEO, while others are relevant for PPC. The types of long-tail keywords you want to target will also depend on your industry. If you sell e-commerce products, you’ll have many long-tail keyword opportunities with your product variants and specifications. You can include keyword terms such as:
For example, a retailer who sells children’s clothes could use a head term like “Polo shirt” and create a long-tail keyword like “Boys blue striped polo shirt.” Service or location-based businesses will target different kinds of keywords entirely. If location is important to your business, then you can use it to create long-tail keywords. A photography business located in Tacoma, WA could target “Tacoma, WA photography services.”
You can also create long-tail keywords using descriptors related to your industry or service. A marketing agency that specializes in promoting dentists, for instance, could target “dental practice marketing services”. Using these suggestions, you can brainstorm long-tail keywords then see if they have good search volume using Keyword Planner. There are indeed lots of ways to find new long-tail keywords to target using various tools.
Here are some options:
Google search is a great tool to help you find relevant long-tail keywords to target. Start out with Google’s autofill feature. Go to Google.com and type in a base keyword. Google will then suggest longer phrases based on your head term:
Google search also provides long-tail keyword ideas from related searches. Search for a root keyword related to your niche, then scroll down to the bottom of the search results to find it:
You can also dig deeper by taking Google’s suggested keywords and re-enter them into the search engine to find new ideas.
If you’re already running PPC campaigns, your current ads can be a goldmine of long-tail keyword ideas to target. The Search Terms Report will show you the actual search terms your current ads are showing for. Most of the search queries you’ll find here are simple variants of your main keyword. The report includes columns showing your target keyword, the customer’s actual search term, and the search term match type:
You can go through the Search Terms Report and look for any long-tail queries that are bringing up your current ads. As long as they’re relevant, these queries could be good to target directly.
Here’s how you find the Search Terms Report:
Keyword multiplier tools are a great option for e-commerce retailers who offer products in a variety of sizes, colors, models, etc. It’s an easy way to build a comprehensive list of long-tail keywords related to your product. There are a plethora of free keyword multiplier tools you can use out there. Just type your head term into one box, then any product variants you want to target in the other boxes (e.g. size, color).
The tool should generate a complete list of all the keyword variants you can target. You won’t want to target every keyword on your new list, but if you take the list to Keyword Planner and run a forecast, you can identify keywords that get enough searches per month to target.
KeywordTool.io is specifically designed to help you find all potential long-tail keyword variations for a base keyword. It utilizes Google’s autocomplete data to generate results, and you can also get suggestions from YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and more. All you do is type in a root keyword and select your language/location targeting, and it returns keyword suggestions:
The paid version of KeywordTool.io also provides search volume, trends, CPC, and competition information.
Answer the Public is another free long-tail keyword research tool you can use. It focuses on illustrating what kind of questions people commonly ask online related to a root keyword. Most of the results you get from Answer the Public will be super long tail. These are top-of-the-funnel questions from people who are just starting to research.
Say, for example, you type in “wireless router” as your root keyword. You’ll see a lot of results like:
These keywords are great to target for SEO, but far too long-tail and top of the funnel to target with PPC. Answer the Public also returns prepositions and comparisons in addition to questions. Dig deeper into these and you’ll find relevant long-tail keywords for PPC targeting.
Answer the Public creates a cool keyword visualization:
Or you can look at lists and export them:
There are so many relevant long-tail keywords to target, it’s easy to clutter your Adwords account with them. Once you build a list of potential long-tail keywords to utilize, make sure you run them through Keyword Planner to ensure they have enough search volume to be worth your direct investment. Removing low search volume keywords from your list doesn’t mean you’ll have to miss out on this traffic. Make sure your ads qualify for all relevant long-tail keywords by creating two campaigns:
This way you can prioritize long tail through campaign bidding, and keep referring back to your Search Terms Report from your General Campaign to find new long-tail keyword opportunities.
Relevance is key to maximizing the value of long-tail keyword targeting for PPC. Optimize your ad copy by including your full keyword. With Google Shopping ads, include images relevant to your keyword targeting as well. For example, an ad targeting the keyword “olive green hiking boots” shouldn’t have an image of brown boots.
Targeting long-tail keywords in Adwords is a great way to optimize ad spend and attract more paid search traffic back to your business. By creating separate campaigns, it’s possible to measure the performance of long-tail keyword targeting against broad match keywords. Monitor performance, then add and remove keywords as necessary. Building an optimized long-tail keyword targeting strategy can bring you long-term returns from relevant, targeted ads.