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.