ClickEquations Blog

The more I work with our new Keyword Zoom feature the stronger my belief in query mining becomes. I’ve always known keywords were a trick, a distraction, and the wrong way to think about success or failure in PPC. Now that trick has been exposed and specific action can be taken on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

Ignoring this opportunity is negligent.

Suppose you were buying a basket of fruit from a local marketplace every morning. But all the vendors only sold baskets, you weren’t allowed to sort through and pick those that were ripe, avoid those that were rotten. You bought the basket, and got what you got. Even worse, you had to take them home and eat ‘em blindfolded.

So everyday that’s what you did. You enjoyed the luscious, winced at the sour, and spit out the rancid as quickly as possible. At the end of the meal sometimes your summary judgement was good and so your returned to that vendor the next day. Other times while there were some high points, there were too many lows and so that vendor was crossed off your list. It never mattered how much excellence there was, it was always the ratio of excellence to junk that rendered the final determination.

That’s exactly how you buy and judge keywords today. At least those with broad and phrase match applied.

There is a much better way.

Zooming In On Waste

As previously described, Keyword Zoom lets you look inside your keywords to see the search queries that the engine is matching and make immediate changes by adding negatives, creating new related keywords, and modifying the existing keyword options.

Unintended and inappropriate search queries matched to your keywords are wasting money every day all across your account. The most obvious place to start when utilizing Keyword Zoom is with those broad match keywords that are getting the highest click volume. They have the most search queries, and in nearly every case there are important improvements to make.

But to focus on serious waste, create a filter that finds all broad match keywords, with at least 10 clicks, and a quality score less than 7. This produces a list of keywords that desperately need help – and that are often easy to help in ways where a few minutes of effort can produce a lifetime of improvement.

Broader Than You Wanna Be

Note that bad queries are not causing the quality score problem. Quality score is only calculated when the query is equal to the keyword, so this is not an exercise to improve quality score. But the low quality score indicates that the keyword is getting low CTR even when the query is identical to the keyword, so it’s often even worse for other queries that are being matched to that keyword.

A huge percentage of the time your low quality score keywords will be generic terms attempting to cover a category or some other rather non-specific topic. Here are the kinds of keywords we often find with low quality scores in PPC accounts:

• military jackets
• water pipe repair
• best down pillow
• lost car keys
• debt settlement plan
• acne treatment

It’s easy to see why the PPC manager wants to reach these people, but it’s also clear that on broad match the search engine will find hundreds or thousands of queries that ‘match’ that keyword, and many of these will be completely and obviously inappropriate for whatever we’re selling or offering.

The engine will happily match ‘duvets’ to ‘pillow’, ‘annuity’ to ‘insurance’, or ‘dog therapy’ to ‘pet treatment’. They’re reasonable semantically, but wasteful financially. It takes pro-active action to avoid paying for these non-convertable queries again and again.

In one of these cases, a single negative would have saved $32 or over 6% of the spend in a 30 day period on a single keyword, boosting ROAS on that keyword by over 15%. That’s a single keyword in a single month – but add key negatives to the most clicked keywords in your account and consider the savings over a year and you have an option for very significant account improvement.

On The Positive Side

Finding and adding negatives is a quick win, and there are many of them. But in the process you’ll notice an overwhelmingly larger opportunity to expand keywords, improve match types, create new add groups, and generally improve your targeting, quality score, and revenues. I’ll cover that in more detail in a future post.

Ever since the release of Keyword Zoom, we’ve been talking a lot about search queries and keywords. Keywords are the gateway in PPC advertising that connect your business to prospects. But, how do you find keyword niches that are profitable?

In this webinar presented by Compete and ClickEquations, you’ll learn 2 unconventional keyword research techniques:

• Competitive intelligence to find keywords with strong intent before you launch your campaigns
• Search query mining to improve your targeting and cut unprofitable clicks after you launch

Watch the recording:

We’re back on the road this week at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can still register and get 20% off with the code 20CLIE.

If you’re coming, please say “hi”

• Stop by booth 321 to check out a live demo of our latest feature, Keyword Zoom. We’re also giving out hard copies of our popular “21 Secret Truths of High Resolution PPC” ebook and Quality Score white paper. Craig will be there to answer your toughest PPC questions.
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• I’ll be speaking on the Search Marketing Toolbox panel on Thursday at 12 alongside David Szetela of Clix Marketing, Ariel Bardin of Google, Dave Snyder of Blueglass, Mark Jackson of Vizion Interactive and our moderator, Simon Heseltine of AOL. Check out my latest article on Search Engine Watch for a sneak preview of my speech.
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• You can also catch me in the Search Engine Watch booth on Wednesday from 2:00 – 3:00 for their “meet the experts” series. I’d love to meet some folks who read my articles or the ClickEquations blog. We can even crack open a laptop and take a look at your account.

If you’d like to setup a specific time to swing by, just drop me a line at marketing@clickequations.com. We’ll also be at many of the networking events, so follow us on Twitter to stay in touch: @clickequations and @digitalalex

See you in San Francisco!

The Keyword Zoom feature is best applied to your most active and important keywords.

To quickly identify them, use the one-click segmentation features in ClickEquations.

Zooming on Head Keywords

The one-click head segment is a customizable feature that allows you to identify those keywords that are most important or influential on your  business.

By default, we create a ‘head’ segment of the keywords that drove 80% of your revenue over the past 30 days. But you can configure your own definition of head keywords in the Settings tab.

Choose to find top keywords based on Clicks, Revenue, or Cost.

The right choice depends on your business:

• Retailers will want to use Revenue or Cost.
• Lead-Gen or B2B firms will likely choose Cost or Clicks.
• Media firms would likely use Clicks or Cost.

Next, Define the date range (use a long one to wash out individual events or short-term bursts) and the threshold percentage. Experiment with threshold percentages, between 70 and 90 – again the right answer depends on your business and account performance.

Remember that the ‘head’ keywords are reassigned based on your definition only once each week – on Sunday night. So if you change your settings, check back the following Monday morning to see the effect. And only keywords and performance on the Search Network(s) are included – no content or display network keywords are included in the counts.

To use the Head Keywords segment to prioritize for Keywords Zoom:

1. Choose the ‘Head Keywords Only’ command from the Filters and Views menu
2. Sort by the metric used to define your head keywords (Revenue, Clicks, or Cost)
3. Select the top keyword, click the Keyword Zoom icon
4. Tune, Tune, Tune.

Filter For Better Zooming

Another – simpler and more generic – way to find keywords that are good candidates for Keyword Zoom is to use a saved filter.

The characteristics of a keyword that can usually be helped by Keyword Zoom include a good number of clicks (usually 10 or more), a broad or phrase match type, and position on the search network (as opposed to content/display).

If you define (and save) the following filter you can view only these keywords with just one click.

Creating this filter applies it, and in the future you can choose it from the Apply Saved Filter menu. Then just sort by Clicks and start zooming.

Zoom Anywhere

These are just two ways to prioritize to find opportune places to use Keyword Zoom to improve your results (like we did).

You can also use it on your brand keywords (using the one-click brand segmentation feature) or just search/filter/sort on criteria that make sense to you. If there are queries there is actionable information.

As you spend time with this new feature, we’d love to hear your comments on how you’re using it and the results you’re able to achieve.

The new Keyword Zoom feature in ClickEquations is an amazing way to tune your campaigns – cutting waste and improving targeting, reach, and results. In this first of a series of posts we’ll look at exactly how it helps.

This time we’ll looking inside the ClickEquations AdWords account and see how we’ve used the feature to our own advantage.

Query Mining 101

The purpose of the Keyword Zoom feature and the point of query mining is to review the search queries that the engine has matched to your keyword (and you’ve paid for) and change the rules of the game so they’re more in your favor in the future – by adding negative keywords or new keywords (usually of more specific match types).

We bid on the keyword ‘pay per click software’ in several match types. Let’s look at our recent activity in the Broad Match version.

Query 1 : Synonyms, Match Types, and Quality Scores

The most active search query for the keyword is ‘pay per click program’ with a whopping 27 clicks and almost $90.00 of spend.

Most of the time when one specific query dominates a broad match keyword like that that you’d want to at least consider moving it out into its own ad group. The deciding factor on moving it is probably how closely the query and the intent is to the broad match – in this case ‘program’ is a common synonym for ‘software’ so it would be fine to leave it alone.

But $90 is a lot of spend in a couple of weeks, and you’d think that by using ‘program’ instead of software in the ad copy, we could improve quality score and maybe save a few bucks on the clicks.

Surprisingly, you can’t. Or at least we haven’t been able to.

It turns out the keyword ‘pay per click program’ is already in the account, in broad, phrase, and exact match – but have quality scores of just ’4′. Since the keyword ‘pay per click software’ has a quality score of 7, the broad match of ‘pay per click software’ is beating the exact match of ‘pay per click program’ for the query ‘pay per click program’.

In some cases we might want to go work on that, and negative the phrase here, but in this case it’s a synonym – people seem happy to click it, Google likes it better (per the quality score), why fight it?

After seeing this data we decided to pause the ‘pay per click program’ keywords (with their lower quality scores). Future queries will match into this keyword and we’ll benefit from the higher quality score with better positions and lower CPCs plus lower the drag on our account from those low quality score keywords.

Query 2: Keyword Expansion & Steering

The next matched search query that we notice is ‘pay per click automation software’. The word ‘automation’ is one people use to describe what they’d want from a paid search platform, but it seems too specific to belong with the general keyword ‘pay per click software’.

A little checking proves that we do have a full ad group of ‘ppc automation software’ keywords, but apparently neglected to include the longer ‘pay per click automation’ version.

So we’ll click the ‘pay per click automation software’ query, click the green + sign to promote it into it’s own keyword, edit it down to just ‘pay per click automation’ and add it as a new phrase match keyword into our existing ppc automation ad group where the text ad copy mentions automation. That’s a lot of steps to take quickly in one single dialog box.

Query 3: Negative Waste Removal

Next the query ‘pay per click application development’ catches our attention.

When someone uses the word ‘development’ they’re not looking to buy ready-to-use SaaS software. So we wasted $2.99 on this click and would waste 100% of any future matches to similar queries.

So we’ll highlight that query, click the red + to create a new negative keyword, edit down to just the word ‘development’ and set it as a campaign negative. Problem solved.

Eliminating Some Real Waste

Sometimes Keyword Zoom shows you where there is room for tuning and improvement.

Sometimes it makes it clear that a keyword is a bust. Look at what it shows us for a term related to one of our competitors, Atlas Search.

It turns out – not surprisingly – that broad matching that term with two very generic words both of which have common and alternate meanings, gives Google a license to match all kinds of queries that clearly do not come from people looking to buy paid search software.

In this case, the solution is easy: click the edit button next to the keyword and pause it.

100% savings from this day forward.

Summary

The two keywords discussed above are good examples of the kinds of benefit Keyword Zoom provides.

In just seconds we’re able to find some low quality keywords that should be paused, redirect some queries with specific intent to better ads, and avoid wasting money on future irrelevant queries.

Each step is small in the specific queries and volume impacted, but if we repeat this procedure regularly, working on our most-clicked and most-costly keywords, the cumulative effect can be dramatic. Every step should increase CTR which drives up quality score. Most steps reduce waste which drives up ROI. Better match between queries and text-ads produces better conversion rates. There are many benefits and each one compounds from the day you complete it on into the future.

We’ve been advocates of query mining for a long time, but like anything else a  friction-free tool makes all the difference in day-in and day-out execution.

This was a simple initial real-world example. In future installments in this series we’ll examine more ways our clients are benefiting from this great new feature.

Even though we occasionally rail against them, keywords are functionally the center of the paid search universe.

Their selection is the single largest point of control you exercise over your account. They hold the bids the (at least indirectly) impact how much you spend, and probably most importantly (and unfortunately) they’re the level at which clicks and CTR and conversions are reported.

Readers of this blog know we think the action is a level below -- where the specific search queries that have been matched to the keywords live, along with the text ad copy that people who execute those queries view and click through.

The belief is that there aren’t good or bad keywords, just queries that are worth more (when matched to the proper ad copy) and queries that are worth less (no matter what ad copy they’re matched with).

This is the reason we were the first paid search platform to offer detailed search query reporting. And even today our ClickEquations still offers by far the most complete and detailed query reporting in the industry.

But it we wanted to take it even further.

Making Search Queries Actionable

In the July release of ClickEquations queries become actionable. We’ve made it possible look inside the performance of any keyword and directly manipulate the queries that have consumed expense or driven revenue and tune the relationship between those queries and specific ad copy.

This is a huge breakthrough, and we call it Keyword Zoom.

To access Keyword Zoom you just double click on any keyword.

This which allows you to see:

• The search queries that the keyword attracted and how each performed.
• The ad copy that was shown to the people who entered these queries.
• Complete performance statistics and metrics for that keyword.

And enables you -- easily and in one place -- to:

• Turn a search query into a new negative keyword so you never pay for those kind of queries again.
• Turn a search query into a new keyword of any match type to capture more related queries and conversions.
• Edit existing ad copy or create new ads or variations to improve the alignment of queries to text ads.

The Power of Relationships

This is a killer feature because of the way it brings all of these capabilities together into one place and enables a fast and friction-free way to tune the performance of any keyword. You could have theoretically done these things before, but:

• By isolating the search queries from a single keyword, as opposed to presenting the list of all queries in an ad group or even campaign, it’s easier to focus on the implications of those queries to the keyword settings (bid and match type) and to think about how to act upon the query information.
  
• By making the transformation from search query into either positive or negative keyword a simple two-click operation (assuming you don’t want to customize any options, more of you do but there is power in having that choice) the process we call query-mining stops being a rare effort and becomes a core task in the search management workflow.
  
• By showing the full query list right next to all the text ads those searchers are seeing, it becomes far easier to reimaging and rewrite ad copy to be vastly more relevant and persuasive. Queries show a diversity and richness that it’s hard to imaging when just looking at or thinking about keywords.
  
• By showing the ad copy click and conversion performance for each different query you can for the first time see when ads are great for some searchers but poorly targeted at others. Just as keywords usually aren’t really bad or good (because some of the queries they catch are great and other queries matched to that same keyword are wastes) it frequently turns out that ad copy isn’t necessarily all bad or all good either. One text ad may work great for some queries and lousy for others -- now you can know this and act accordingly..

What’s happening here is that we’re for the first time exposing a 360-degree view around the keyword, showing how it relates to queries and ad copy and how those each relate to each other. To get a better sense of it, check out this video:

This ability -- the view and the fluidity with which it makes changes possible -- proves a whole new way to improve your paid search results. We’re very excited to bring you this capability in ClickEquations.

To learn more and get a complete demo of ClickEquations, attend one of our public webinars or contact us to schedule a personal discussion or demonstration.

Our ebook The 21 Secret Truths of PPC takes a broad strategic and tactical look at paid search. Over the past few months in this series we’ve looked at each truth from another angle, expanding or elaborating on the concept each contained.

If you were to attempt to sum up the ideas in this series, you might get something like this:

Paid search is the process of answering questions. Focusing on the search queries that deliver those questions rather than the keywords that attract them makes it easier to provide direct and persuasive answers in your text ads.

The organization of your account is the key to a lot of your success. The way you choose to group keywords into ad groups defines the way your text ads align with the search queries you attract. And the way you place ad groups into campaigns defines the utility of your reports. Segmentation is an equally important part of your organization. Keep brand, head, content network, ego-based, and other keyword groups isolated so that their unique attributes can be understood and optimized.

At the keyword level, a focus on search queries will help you to reduce your reliance on broad match. Mine your search queries for new keywords with more targeted match types and new negatives. And pay attention to click-through rate and the factors that drive quality score. Bidding is important but not omnipotent. Don’t expect too much from or apply too much effort to bidding until your keywords are otherwise optimized. Make sure you’re measuring profit as your goal, not just return on ad spending. And when you’re buying keywords for ego-based(non-economic) reasons, make bidding decisions accordingly.

Writing effective ad copy is difficult given the complex communication goals and tiny available space. The only way to succeed is via trial and error, otherwise known as testing. While gaining the click is your initial goal, it’s what your prospect does after that click ultimately determines your success. Consider and coordinate the entire post-click experience as part of your overall PPC management program.

Reports and metrics are important, but make sure you know what they’re really saying. People can’t click ads that they can’t see.

And finally, although your account is large and ever-changing, there is almost certainly a concentration of revenue within a very small number of keywords. So prioritize your time and adjust your expectations accordingly. Don’t waste time chasing your own tail.

Objections? Extensions?

Before moving on past this series, I want to ask for more feedback. We’ve had thousands of downloads of the ebook, and tens of thousands of page views in this series, and not one good argument yet. And not nearly enough praise

Which of the truths do you think is just an opinion? Are there central PPC truths that were left out? Speak now before the guy with the stone tablets and chisel gets to work.

Get The Free eBook

This post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

Download Your Copy Today
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The ability to prioritize and focus is a key skill for any paid search manager. With campaigns stuffed with hundreds-of-thousand or even millions of keywords, organized into hundreds or thousands of ad groups, and presenting metrics from zillions of clicks and conversions, there is always too much to do.

No paid search manager has ever finished their work and gone home early. Some may have gone home early, but they weren’t finished.

There are many wise and legitimate ways to prioritize. Perhaps the most important comes, ironically, from the ‘long tail’ that consumes so much of our media attention and has forced the culture of keyword expansion (a de-focusing force) upon us. The priority is at the head end.

The Big Head

In the last release of ClickEquations we introduced one-click segmentation features. One of them automatically tags some subset of your keywords as ‘head keywords’. The user-customizable definition starts as the smallest number of keywords that are responsible for 80% of your revenue over the last 30 days. In other words your 30 biggest earners.

In our 250,000 keyword demo account, between 200-900 keywords are normally tagged as ‘head keywords’ depending on purchase histories of the preceeding 30 days. That means using this one-click segment takes 99.8% of all the keywords in the account out of the way, and allows you to easily spend your time getting those .2% into tip-top shape.

Think about that for a second. Two-tenths-of-one-percent of our keywords drive 80% of our revenue. What a great opportunity to prioritize and focus.

• Most of us don’t spend enough time writing text ads – maybe for this small group we can find the time.
• Many accounts have too many keywords per ad group – maybe these winners can at least earn their way into super-narrow ad groups.
• Even query mining takes time – perhaps for these big-ticket words we can devote the attention required to add some negatives and promote some exact matches and push our profitability even higher.

With a management goal of getting everything right surrounding 500 keywords, there’s even a chance, admittedly slim, that we’ll finish and go home guilt-free for a change.

More importantly, it presents one clear signal we can use to prioritize. Again, it’s not the only one. It may not be perfect for everyone. But the idea of separating the urgent from the important from the interesting is critical in PPC and doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

A Bunch of Long Tails

If you’ve followed along this far in this series, you may have already guessed the rub with keyword prioritization.

We’re much bigger fans of search queries than we are of keywords, and our natural inclination would be to take any keyword that is garnering a lot of clicks, consuming a lot of expense, or generating almost any revenue at all and dive deep into the search queries that were matched to that keyword and add more negatives and new positive, more specifically matched, keywords.

In effect we want to create mini tails around our top performing keywords – extending the range and specificity of the keywords and flattening the curve that leads to the long tail.

Fragmenting our top performing keywords in this way can really skew the results of a head-defining approach like that described above. So over time we’ll have to move towards using top performing ad groups – each narrowly defined themselves – or tag-based clusters of keywords, to gain the focus we seek.

The goal and ultimately result will be the same, but the process will be much different.

Finding Your Priorities

For most people the benefits of a simple ‘head keyword’ definition far outweigh the limitations, at least unless they’ve already done a tone of query mining. The ‘head keywords’ approach is the right place to start and can be a great prioritization tool.

Longer term it should also be a goal to outgrow this technique. With aggressive query mining and organizational narrowing it should be considered a success when the process isn’t effective anymore and you need to move on to one that’s more sophisticated.

However you choose to do it, every paid search manager should be able to answer this question: Which 2% of my keywords do I have to execute on perfectly, and which 98% can I manage to much looser standards.

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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We’re cohosting a free webinar with our friends at Compete to share 2 unconventional techniques to finding the right keywords (or, rather, search queries).

Keywords are the gateway in PPC advertising that connect your business to prospects. But, how do you find keyword niches that are profitable?

In this free webinar presented by Compete and ClickEquations, you’ll learn 2 unconventional keyword research techniques

1. Competitive Intelligence – Discover which words are driving traffic to your competitors sites and which ones drive engagement.
2. Search Query Mining – Uncover the real words people use before they click on your text ad and stop irrelevant clicks

You’ll leave with actionable tips and free tools  you can use immediately to improve your PPC campaigns. Space is limited. Register now!