Blog category

Why relevancy is key to better ROI

May 30, 2008

It’s not all about high-volume traffic. Surprising as it may seem, the objective of paid search marketing is not to drive masses of random visitors to your site. In fact that may even be harmful.

Go away

Every time your advert displays on a search results page it creates an ‘impression’. And every time the searcher fails to click on your advert, your clickthrough rate goes down. The lower your clickthrough rate, the lower your quality score. The lower your quality score, the lower your position on the page.

So the answer is simply to encourage people to click on your advert, right? Wrong. Every time a searcher clicks on your advert without converting into a lead / prospect / customer, it costs you money, so you lose again.

Welcome

You don’t want you advert appearing to too wide an audience. You want your advert to show in response to relevant searches. This is a targeted audience of people who are looking for what you are offering.

It’s far better to get a small number of impressions that result in a higher number of clicks that are more likely to lead to conversions.

Keyword relevancy

The first part of the solution lies in the precision of keyword selection. Refine the keyword phrases to be as specific as possible. Keep unwanted visitors away by including negative keywords. Use keywords that are relevant to your actual market (consider age, gender, location, pricing, special offers, products, business sector, etc.).

Advert relevancy

Now your advert is showing to relevant searchers. The next step is to encourage them to click on your advert. The most obvious way is to create a connection betwen the search term and your advert – include some or all of the keyword phrase in the advert wording. Another approach is to create multiple adverts, each closely aligned to a collection of very similar keyword phrases. In other words, make the advert relevant to the search term.

Landing page relevancy

Now you have a visitor on your site. The next step is to convert him/her into a lead / prospect / customer. The landing page must make this as easy as possible. Do not send visitors to your home page or some vague page and expect them to hunt around. Send them to a page that clearly connects with the search term. A page that enables decision making and action taking. A relevant page.

You’ve probably got the message by now. If there’s one word to keep in mind when building PPC campaigns, it’s “relevancy”.

Filed in: Pay Per Click