ClickEquations Blog

This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to extend and expand on the content in our free ebook ’21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC’. Request your copy here.

Keywords are over-rated.

One of the underlying themes of High-Resolution PPC is that the popular notion of how paid search works is wrong. Or more accurately, that it’s vastly over-simplified in a way that harms those who believe it.

Keywords are a great example. As promoted by the search engines and most of those who talk about them, keywords are the center of paid search. Keywords define your targets and attract your prospects. Keywords take your bids, costs are hung on them, and they collect the statistics used to judge performance.

All of this is reasonable. And a few years ago when prices were lower, competition was relatively tame, and the resulting profits were high, it was good enough.

Not anymore.

What keywords really do is act like magnets. They attract people who execute searches based on certain search queries. The strength of their magnetism is based on the match types that are applied to them. Exact match keywords only attract search queries that are identical to the keywords, but the more prevalent phrase and broad match keywords attract – or might attract – a huge range of queries.

In the simple and traditional discussion of paid search, search queries do not exist. Keywords are their proxies. Keywords are as specific as the conversation gets.

In that version of the world, the focus is on keyword performance (such as click-through rates) and results (in things like return on ad spend). By looking at these numbers, people make important judgments and decisions. Ultimately keywords are deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

But while all this is happening, something much more important is going on, and being ignored. Before every click, the keyword is matched to a search query. Keywords that aren’t using exact match are seeing traffic from dozens or hundreds of different search queries.

For each keyword, some of these search queries deliver excellent performance and results while others are complete wastes of time and money.

By looking at these queries, and how they perform, our judgments and decisions can be far more accurate and effective. We can cut waste, double-down on winners, and even more importantly setup our campaigns and ad groups to much more effectively answer the questions that the searchers we’re paying for are actually asking.

That’s why search queries are far more important than keywords.

It’s easy to demonstrate why you have to look past keywords and focus on search queries.

• Suppose you have a keyword that’s performing terribly. It has very few clicks, a low quality score, and a terrible ROAS. Your inclination might be to pause or delete it right? But what if you looked at the search queries and found that out of 87 different queries you’ve paid for thus far, every single conversion came from just one variant – and that query seemed to convert every time it was clicked. You’d want to save that query wouldn’t you? Killing the keyword would have thrown that baby out with the bathwater.
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• Or suppose you have a keyword that is killing it. It has a huge CTR and is making tons of genuine profit. All’s well right? Until you look at the queries and find that there are ten or so relatively frequent queries, all of which share a common root phrase, that almost never convert. Adding that phrase as a negative would cut costs and boost profits even higher. Ignoring queries in that case is like a great team that allows one weak player to ride along and lower the stats. Why do that?
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• And lastly, much of what you’ll learn by putting search queries first isn’t that one keyword is good or bad, but that the questions being asked are not being well answered – the alignment of queries and ads (questions and answers) is off due to organizational problems in your campaigns. And when you fix these we’re not talking about boosting the performance of one or two keywords but rather the chance to radically shift (meaning improve) the performance of your entire account. But if you don’t look at the queries there is no way to know that they contain questions that aren’t being answered.

The only downside of moving from keyword management to search query management is that it takes time and effort. This is true. But it’s an iterative process, it can be managed on a clearly prioritized basis (ie you don’t have to do all of it at once), and the fact is that if you don’t do it you’re just wasting tons of money and foregoing a lot of sales and profit. There is no way around this.

If our job is to answer questions, then search queries have to become the center of our attention.

What do you think?

This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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The first truth from our new ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’ was leaked, on this very blog, in our New Years Day post.

That post, entitled ‘They’re Searching For Answers’ introduced the idea that every search is a question, and text-ads are an attempt to answer those questions.

(We’ll wait while you go read it.)

This is not just our first ‘Secret Truth’ but a kind of a guiding principle behind the entire collection.

It’s important because it turns the focus around and clarifies the fact that users (prospects, customers, searchers, whatever you want to call them) are driving this process. It’s demand driven marketing. They’re in control. We’re here to satisfy them, and only get to stay in the game as long as they think we are or at least might satisfy them. Our role is to anticipate and fulfill their needs. We can’t manipulate them.

In addition to getting us out of a dominant mindset and into a subservient one, this idea is also critical because so much of how we organize, target, option, value, and otherwise manage our campaigns – as we’ll explain in the 20 Truths to follow – can be guided and judged by how well it helps us to better align our answers to their questions.

Nearly every choice you make in the configuration of your paid search campaigns either clarifies or distorts alignment.

• If you put a lot of keywords into an ad group, they attract a wide range of search queries and the alignment between any one query and the provided ad copy can suffer.
• Organize ad groups into campaigns in the wrong way, and the campaign-level numbers you see won’t tell you if things are aligned or not.
• Use a lot of broad match, alignment will range from perfect to extremely remote.
• Bid too low, and your competitors will out rank you (and sometimes show when you don’t) for the most aligned queries.
• Fail to geo-target adequately and you’ll align with the right queries but from the wrong people – same bad result.

So it helps to have this simple prime directive : target the questions you want to answer, and then answer them directly.

When this rule isn’t followed, a lot of innocent keywords, text-ads, and landing pages pay the price.

Consider one example:

• If the keyword is ‘snow plow’ running on broad match
• The search queries include many things like ‘who can plow the snow off my driveway in Allentown PA’
• The text ad copy says ‘J-Deere 150″ Plow Extensions for Your F-150″.

In this case the keyword is likely to have a terrible CTR and conversion rate. It might be judged a ‘bad keyword’ and paused or deleted.

But in-fact the problem is that we’re delivering answers that have nothing to do with the questions being targeted. What’s needed is more keyword negatives and probably a lot of keyword expansion (to grab all the words and phrases that broad match is eligible to capture in ways that we can organize and answer them far more accurately).

Poor results here are predictable. And the reason for them can clearly can be seen in the results. But many times we look at the metrics for our keywords, text-ads, and landing pages (not to mention campaigns and ad groups) and draw conclusions without taking the time to see if we were answering the question they were asking.

Paid search advertising is the process of paying to answer questions. It only sense to work very hard to answer them well.

Understanding that this is what we’re doing is the first step.

What do you think?
This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

Reserve Your Copy Today

21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC is our soon-to-be released ebook that shares what we think are the guiding principles for efficient and effective paid search management.

The idea for ‘High-Resolution PPC’ was hatched two or three years ago, as we looked deeper and deeper into how paid search really worked, and how large and complex paid search campaigns should be managed.

At the time we were managing accounts for a range of very large advertisers. Like anyone else we were striving to produce better results. But we were constantly frustrated by the limits of the data we could access, the inflexibility of the tools at our disposal, and the general level of transparency we felt the engines were providing into how the choices we made impacted the behavior and performance of our campaigns.

To address the first two issues, we accepted a venture capital investment, built an in-house product development team, and created ClickEquations. To address the last item, we began development of what was originally called ‘the methodology’.

The methodology was an effort to document the facts about how search worked and the process that one should follow to build and manage accounts. It started as a collection of ideas, beliefs, and habits we assumed were best practices. Over time we pulled back to look at the shape and sequence of the overall process, and dove in to examine individual elements, options, and interactions.

Eventually a framework emerged. Groups of items and options that fit together. Stages of the process that had natural breaks and measurable outcomes. The framework provided a structure around which all the steps, options, measurements, goals, interactions, and components of paid search management could be organized.

It got the name ‘High-Resolution PPC’ because one recurring theme of the exercise was the fact that everything we knew before was right, but far too over-simplified.

• Keywords mattered, but only in the way they attracted search queries, which had a lot to do with how and when match types were assigned.
• Bids mattered, but only due to their influence on ad rank which itself influenced CPC.
• CTR mattered, but it (and nearly everything else) was reported as an average and if you accepted the number without really thinking hard about how it was calculated you were likely to be misled. The examples continued endlessly.
• The list went on and one. Most of what we knew or thought was in fact true, but there was always a but. And if you know about the ‘but’ you would take different action than if you didn’t.

It seemed like the conventional wisdom was paid search at 300-dpi, but with a little effort and thought we could understand and act at 2400-dpi.

More accurate info. More precise actions. Better results. Higher resolution.

For the last 18-months or so we’ve continued to refine the High-Resolution PPC framework, and research and document the information on which it’s based. We’ve talked a bit about the process of managing paid search in this way (the original outline is presented here), and some of the posts on this blog over the past year have discussed elements of paid search in the terms we see and use them within High-Res.

But our new ebook is the first complete summary of what we’ve learned, at least in terms of the facts and philosophies we’ve come to consider the structural base of High-Resolution PPC.

To keep the book snappy, and a reasonable length, it’s written in a concise style – with just 1 page per item. Over the next month, this blog will feature a behind-the-scenes tour of the 21 truths, with expositions, examples, and with your help some conversations.

Sign up below to get your copy. And if you’ll be at SMX, SES, or OMMA in March, please visit the ClickEquations booth for a full color printed copy.

Get a free copy of ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

The ebook will be available for download later this month.

Request Your Copy Today

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In advance of our new ebook, and some other projects just behind it, I built a new website focused on High-Resolution PPC.

To support that site, I created a new AdWords account and added two small ad groups with a total of 9 keywords and two text ads. Every keyword is a brand or navigational variation of the term ‘high-resolution ppc’.

That phrase is in the domain name and all over the home page, which serves as landing page for both ads.

This is a story of how quality score evolves.

At First, They Don’t Trust You

This is a brand new account. It has no CTR history. The ads are new. There is no visible URL history. The website has existed, and been indexed in Google, for a few months but with just a few pages and virtually no traffic.

The keyword ‘high resolution ppc’ does have a CTR history, because in our Clickequations.com AdWords account we buy the broad match version and aim ads at a page for ebook sign-ups.

I added six exact match keywords (shown right) to the first ad group. The initial bid was set to $0.10.

A few minutes after creation, they were all listed with a quality score of 3/10 and a First page bid estimate of $1.00.

Interestingly, Relevance was initially listed as ‘No Problem’ but 14 hours later is listed as ‘Poor’ for every keyword.

Because the corporate account had bid on the keyword, I looked in ClickEquations to see how it was doing. ‘High resolution ppc’ (broad match) has a quality score of 7 and a Max CPC of $0.10. Relevance says ‘no problems’. The ad copy and landing page for that keyword also use the phrase in just about every place possible.

Given the lack of history, and knowing that history matters, I accept for the moment the fact that it’s necessary to bid $1.00 per click for a phrase I made up (ie the competition is light, on both content and competitive bidders). So I raise the bid on the one exact match keyword ‘high resolution ppc’ to $1.00.

The ad did not start showing in the SERPS. So I went to sleep.

Money Talks
This morning I checked again. The ad from the new account is now in position #1, at the top. It still has a quality score of 3, and a ‘Poor’ rating for Relevence.

Someone explain how these keywords could be more relevant for the search queries, text-ad copy, and target URL – all of which contain the exact 3-word phrase.

It had zero impressions or clicks overnight. To boost my CTR, I clicked it the time I ran my search to check it. Cost me a buck, but my CTR is now 100%!

There were only 3 ads shown the first time I searched. The book ad, the one from ClickEquations, and one from AdWords themselves trying to lure innocents into PPC for the first time.

Interestingly, and perhaps coincidentally, after my $1.00 self-help click, the phrase now returns 14 AdWords ads – due to broad matching on the ‘ppc’ part of the search query no doubt. I guess once Google sees that people who search this phrase will click paid ads, the ads come a-runnin’.

What Happens Next
There’s nothing too revealing in all this. The time frames and data sets are tiny, the behaviour is more or less consistent with what we’ve been told about quality score. Yet I find the rare opportunity to view a case study with so few complications appealing.

It won’t be pure, of course. Some of you will go run the query, depressing the CTR. A few will even click the ad, wasting a little money

But over the next few weeks we’ll see what happens.

1. How long will it take to get the quality score up from 3 to at least 7?
2. When will Google recognize that the relevance is perfect, not poor?
3. Will the CTR on the new version of the ads beat the old ones that earned the quality score of 7?
4. How long until I can get the bid down from $1.00 (which clicks are not worth) to $0.10 (which they may be)?
5. Once the account grows, what will be the best way to monitor and control lifetime account CTR history, and visible URL CTR history?
6. How much is this experiment going to cost? (Note: It’s not entirely an experiment, the ad and site are real and will live on – the learning is a bonus.)

Stay tuned….

UPDATES:

Day 2 – Quality Score 4, CTR 40%, Impression 10, Clicks 4
Day 4 – Quality Score 5, CTR 45%, Impressions 11, Clicks 5
Day 4 – Lowered bid from $1.oo (former ‘first page bid estimate) to $.80)
Day 4 – Added new ad group with 1 keyword – Craig Danuloff (broad match) initial QS=5
Day 4 – Noticed that navigational keywords (www.highresolutionppc.com) have QS=7
Day 6 – Quality Score 7, CTR 41%, Impressions 12 (So it wasn’t a volume issue). Ave CPC to date = $0.87 Ave Pos 1.1
Day 7 – Lowered bid from $0.80 to $0.25
Day 7 – First Page Bid Estimates on other KW in ad group, dropped from $1.00 to $0.20 where QS rose to 6 from 3-4
Day 7 – First Page Bid Estimates on other KW in ad group, dropped from $1.00 to $0.30 where QS rose to 5 from 3-4

For much of last year, regular readers of this blog know that we’ve talked about the idea of ‘High-Resolution PPC’.

High-Resolution PPC is about clarity. It’s about removing the confusion surrounding how things work, which measurements matter, and what you should do to drive better paid search results.

In the coming weeks and months we’re going to share a lot more details and thoughts about this new way of understanding and managing paid search.

One huge milestone in that process will be the release, later this month, of ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

This will be a free eBook available to anyone who requests it, and we’ll have special full-color printed copies if you visit us at the SES, OMMA or SMX trade shows in March.

The book shares the 21 core facts and philosophies upon which we believe effective paid search management is based.

They’re called ‘Secret Truths’ because this isn’t a summary of the popular notions that typically pass for paid search best practices. This is a ground-up reconsideration of what each component in the system does, and a rebuild of how you should manage based on this fact-based (rather than faith-based) view.

One person who’s seen the final book is Avinash Kaushik. Here’s what he had to say:

“The glory of paid search is hyper relevance and how absolutely data driven it is. If your goal is to be the best you can be at paid search then your path goes through this e-book.”
- Avinash Kaushik, Author: Web Analytics 2.0.

You can sign up now to be notified as soon the the download is released. (Note: If you signed up from previous mentions, we have your name so you’re already on the list.)

The Search Engine Marketing Professional’s Organization (SEMPO) hosted us for our latest webinar: Quality Score in High Resolution.

Quality Score is just as important at keywords and bids in PPC, but isn’t nearly as well understood. In this webinar you’ll find thorough explanation of what Quality Score is, what it means and how you can improve yours.

If you like the webinar, check out our Quality Score white paper.

“The traditional view of paid search has been that it’s about keywords and bids. And a lot of PPC management time and attention gets spent on keywords – expanding them, bidding on them, organizing them, et cetera.

But the truth is that keywords are just a means to an end; they’re little magnets sent out there to attract search queries. And if you’re only able to review reports and make decisions at a keyword level, you’re not getting a very accurate or informative picture of what’s really happening in your account – so you’re almost certainly making bad decisions and not optimizing your results.”

That’s a snipped of the Craig Danuloff’s interview with Josh Dreller, paid search columnist at Search Engine Land and VP at Fuor Digital, on the topic of query mining. He covers a broad range of questions:

• Where can an SEM pro go to find search query data?
• Why did you invest so much time into building query reports into ClickEquations?
• Why do you hate Broad Match so much?
• I’m supportive of your suggestion of an Include match type. Can you sum up your thoughts on this for the readers?
• What is the best way to organize search queries to gather insights for optimization?
• What are some best practices to utilize once you’ve analyzed the query data?

Check out the full article.

The fifth ClickEquations report featured in Avinash Kaushik’s recent blog post concerned the ability of ClickEquations to show actual search queries matched to each keyword.

This is a feature of the core ClickEquations reporting screen, and shows all queries from all search engines by keyword and match type.

There is a related ClickEquations Analyst Report that makes use of this data in a very powerful way.

It’s called the ‘Unique Queries Per Keyword’ report. It counts the number of different queries that the search engines are matching to each of your keywords, and presents them sorted by the number of queries.

On the list above for example, the keyword ‘dog remedy’ in Broad Match was matched by Google to 528 different search queries. Yowsa!

If a keyword is being matched to over 500 different search queries, two things are almost certainly true:

• There are some pretty unrelated search queries in there that have to be avoided with negatives
• There are dozens of new phrase and exact match keywords that need to be added to better attack these queries.

This of course is how we generally use the search query report, but with this prioritized view we can quickly find the keywords where keyword negatives and expansion is critically needed. Every negative we add saves us money. Every keyword we add in this way has multiple benefit, especially those using phrase and exact match types. Each can be expected to:

• Increase our Impression Share by expand the pool of queries to which we’ll be matched
• Improve Quality Score by by increasing relevance and increasing number of times query exactly matches keyword
• Enables us to bid to the value of each keyword rather than once for whole broad group
• If we do get increased Quality Score on specific Keywords, our CPC could/should be lower on those queries.

In summary, there are lots of advantages to a more detailed keyword build-out when it’s driven by actual queries not random speculation.

Finding Keyword Expansion Ideas
To find out which keywords we need to add to both our keyword and negative lists, we can jump back into the ClickEquations application and find all the queries that Google matched to ‘dog remedy’.

Likely negatives would be words for illnesses that we don’t sell product for – dysplasia, pancreatitis, rabies, etc. Areas for expansion are those which come up a lot – mange, itching, and vomiting seam like winners in this area – to name a few.

Highly specific words clarify intent – which gets a lot of press in the ‘long tail’ discussion of keyword expansion. The same is true on the negative side: highly specific words can verify incompatible intent.

Bulk Importing Keywords and Negatives
Since it looks like we may want to add a lot of new keywords and negatives, we can jump back into ClickEquations Analyst and pull the full query list into Excel, make a few edits, and then bulk import that edited list back into ClickEquations.

Squash The Broad Match
Our Match Type Keyword Trap white paper discusses how you should use match types to take control of your search queries back from the search engines.

Using the capabilities described above to quickly find the keywords where broad match (and to a lessor degree phrase match) is running out-of-control is a great first step towards taking back control, saving yourself some money, and expanding the reach of your account.

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If you missed our recent webinar, Master Search Queries to Save Money and Increase Conversions, you’re in luck. The recording is now available below and in our free resources section.

Watch the search query webinar to learn:

• What search queries are
• Where to find search queries
• The best way to organize your search queries to identify opportunities to save money and increase conversions
• Actions you should take daily, weekly and monthly to profit from search queries

Links mentioned in the webinar:

• ClickEquations Analyst
• ClickEquations Analyst Templates
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
• Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Finding Synonyms for Low Volume Keywords

As you monitor your search queries, the actual words searchers type vs. the keywords you buy, you’ll find two types:

1. Winners – Search Queries that convert (or assist) profitably and may be worth promoting to Exact Match at a higher bid
2. Losers – Search Queries that generate clicks and cost without any value. They’re definite candidates for negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

You can get even more bang from your Winners and Losers by looking for synonyms with 2 free tools: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and Google AdWords: Keyword Tool.

These data sets, however, are limited. The more niche your term, the harder it can be to find additional words. If you’re working in B2B or other low volume verticals, you’ll need a different tactic.

Enter: Google’s related searches.

Finding Long Tail Synonyms with Google’s Related Searches

At the end of some search results pages, Google presents a list of related terms to help searchers:

These lists can be a good source for synonyms for your niche terms. It’s tedious to scroll through the page. Instead, use Google’s Wonder Wheel option to speed up your research.

At the top of your search results, click “Show Options” (the plus sign). Then choose Wonder Wheel in the left nav.

The result is a hub and spoke graphic that shows you related queries. Now, you can conduct searches and see the gather synonyms more quickly:

For more tips, check our our free white papers and videos. Sign up for our free monthly Paid Search Professionals Newsletter.