When you’re dealing with a niche and high value product, competition for active buyers in paid search can be fierce. And expensive. Consider this example from enterprise security:

It’s basic economics: the smaller the universe and higher the value of click, the higher the CPC. If you’re in B2B or marketing another complex purchase, you likely need to be in front of this audience.

But, it’s not the only way to reach them. And you can pay 90 percent less.

Target Prospects When They’re Ready to Learn

Buying isn’t a linear process, but prospects generally go through some various phases of consideration before they purchase. The classic marketing AIDA model is a good way to think of the phases of search activity. It stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action and looks a little like this:

Somebody searching for “networks security software,” for example, is likely in the Action phase. Their search goals are focused around the execution of their purchase vs. research about the problem.

That same person would like search “how to improve network security” or “network security advice” well before they’re ready to buy. When prospects are in the awareness stage, they’re looking for education, not a sales pitch.

They’re also much cheaper to target.

I know this from personal experience. I manage the paid search campaign for ClickEquations, a SaaS platform to help people measure and manage their paid search advertising more effectively. As you can imagine, reaching Action searchers is pricey.

However, that same audience often searches for education about how to manage paid search efficiently. You can offer them a white paper. Educational clicks are 90 percent less expensive:

Ready to Learn

Ready to Buy

In addition to reducing your cost, you get the benefit of reaching customers before the competition and the ability to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Successfully targeting learners vs. buyers requires a different approach. Here are three tips for reach your prospects when they’re ready to learn.

Tip 1: Get Their Contact Information Without Asking For It

It’s common knowledge that adding form fields decreases conversion rate and increases your cost-per-conversion in most cases. But, how much do you really give up?

Jon Miller, co-founder and head of marketing at Marketo (disclosure: I’m a customer), wrote a really interesting article where he quantified the cost of adding more fields to his landing pages:

Conversion rate decreased 30 percent and cost went up $10 per lead! Not surprisingly, the most expensive field to add was phone number.

Asking for a phone number is often a sticking point for sales and marketing. Sales wants and needs the number to reach out to prospects, but, for early stage, educational content in particular, prospects are reluctant to disclose it and you miss a chance to establish a relationship.

As Miller points out in the article, however, there are other ways to get the data.

One solution to consider is Jigsaw Enterprise. It’s a Salesforce company that’s directly integrated into the platform. What distinguishes it from others is their data source: it’s crowdsourced as people enter contact information they have to credits for the info they want.

It’s also automatic. You can set up the system to auto-append information that isn’t associated with the record (which I recommend rather than over-writing something a prospect or sales rep has entered):

The data, which is appended every 12 hours, isn’t perfect or complete and the system isn’t priced for small businesses. But it does offer an automated way to increase conversions without losing all of the contact information your sales team needs.

Tip 2: Integrate Offline Conversion Tracking

Finding the keywords and setting up a landing page are relatively straightforward processes when you’re targeting learners. As you would expect, these people need to be nurtured and marketed to over time before they move into the Desire and Action phases.

That exacerbates an underlying issue with complex sales: long sales cycles and offline conversions. Not every educational prospect will be equally valuable. That is say: not every lead is qualified.

Ultimately, we want to adjust our marketing mix and paid search buys based on what closes, not just who flirts with us.

From a PPC perspective, however, that presents a challenge as we have to tie together three systems:

• Search engine data
• Our PPC tool
• Business outcomes from our customer relationship management (CRM) database

The trick to connecting the three systems together is the use of an external ID for each keyword. That unique key allows you connect front end data (clicks, cost, CPC) with online conversions (form submissions) and the later stage activity (opportunities, sales, retention).

A key can be any alphanumeric value, for example extid=18MQGH1MGKKQAG3T0.

You need four things to use this approach:

1. System To Generate External IDs: This can be as simple as a spreadsheet or a more sophisticated platform that creates them automatically. Each key has to be specific to the keyword.
2. Hidden Form Field to Capture External IDs: The IDs will be appended to your destination URL as a parameter. A hidden form field on your landing page will grab that ID from your URL. If you’ve ever setup a Salesforce form and added in a campaign or lead source variable, it’s the same approach.
3. Method to Export External IDs with Values from a CRM: You need to be able to create a report or list that associates each external ID with a latent conversion and value from your system (e.g., “1 Opportunity” and “$500″).
4. Tool to Connect Paid Search Data with External Conversions: Once you have an ID for a keyword and a value for that ID, you need technology to stitch together the two so you can measure, report, optimize, and bid on business outcomes.

Note that outcomes data, by its very nature, will be sparser than micro-conversions. You can optimize on earlier actions and do a biweekly or monthly review with the later stage data.

Tip 3: Retarget Prospects on the Display Network

It used to be that search marketers only got one, maybe two, chances to convert someone on a landing page before we lost them.

That changed with the introduction of retargeting, or remarketing as Google calls it. Briefly: remarketing allows you to show display ads only to an audience of people who have been to your site and exhibited some desirable behavior.

A classic business-to-consumer example is shopping cart recovery, or the targeting of buyers who added items to their shopping cart but who did not check out.

There is a parallel in B2B marketing. Prospects who visit your landing page, but don’t fill out your form are the most likely to convert from a display campaign and worth chasing with ads for a few days at least.

Setting up a remarketing campaign is relatively straightforward.

First, create what Google calls “Audience.” Set up a separate campaign for retargeting. Go to Campaigns > Audiences > Add Audience. If you don’t see the Audience tab, select the drop down arrow to add it.

In the “Create and manage lists” section, you’ll need to create three lists:

1. People who visited your landing page.
2. Those who visiting your thank you page (i.e., converted).
3. A custom combination of list 1 and not list 2 (i.e., those who visited, but didn’t convert)

For each list (1 and 2), you’ll have a tag to put on your landing page (list 1) and your thank you page (list 2). This allows Google to cookie your audiences appropriately.

There is a lot of strategy in how to design and prioritize remarketing lists. I recommend you read Brad Geddes excellent article on the topic for more detail.

To be read for a remarketing campaign you’ll need:

• Banner ads to run on the display network. You’ll want text ads too, as some sites don’t accept banner ads.
• Separate campaigns for better budgeting and bidding.
• Proper tracking and attribution. Last click will only make it look like your retargeting campaign deserves all of the credit.

And We’re Only Just Getting Started…

Complex sales require marketing that supports how buyers purchase at every stage. Paid search is an integral part of that mix. If you’re locked out of active buyers because of CPCs or simply looking for a way to expand your PPC buy, targeting prospects when they need education is a great strategy.

To learn more about B2B paid search, I recommend you read The Buyersphere Project by Mediative (formerly Enquiro) and Ryan DeShazer’s recent column, “The Reinvention of B2B Paid Search.

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:

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.

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.

Queries are vital because they can contain insight into the desire or intent of the user. If you sell tennis racquets, for example, and buy the keyword ‘tennis racquet’ (using the standard Broad Match) then your ad might be shown to someone who wants ‘tennis racquet restringing’, or ‘New Prince V14 Tennis Racquet’ or  ‘used cheap tennis racquet’ or even someone looking for ‘tennis racquet art’.

Are each of those people relevant to you? Are the ones that are relevant equally relevant? Can you write a single text ad that speaks directly to each of those people and persuades them to click and take action?

We’re tackling all things search queries in our next free webinar, “Master Search Queries to Save Money and Increase Conversions” on Thursday, July 16th at 1:00 EST. We’ll cover:

• 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

Sign up for the free webinar!

-Alex

The goal of our campaigns is to have our text-ads matched with the most appropriate search queries. Keywords are just the tool we use to get to the most qualified queries.

With that in mind, it’s my opinion that the world of keyword selection and expansion is quite broken.

Keyword selection in PPC – broadly and generally as I’ve seen it practiced and promoted by both ‘experts’ and tools providers – is about finding every possible word and phrase related to the category or topic at hand.

This is a great strategy if you’re a paid search engine looking to make money from way too many clicks with way too little targeting.

It’s not really to your advantage if you’re an advertiser looking to maximize returns.

Waiting For Your Keywords To Bark
Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg wrote ‘Waiting For Your Cat To Bark‘ several years ago, as one of several books covering their Persuasion Architecture process (now built into their OnTarget offering), and it remains a book I don’t think any online marketer should miss.

Among the many brain-tingling discussions in ‘Bark’ is the idea that people come to the web with a very specific idea in mind, a personality all their own (but categorically like a lot of other people), and a situation that they’re in along with a goal they’re trying to achieve.

This bundle makes up their buying process. I’m a massively geeky tech freak with a strong need to fit in and a brother whose birthday is Saturday so I MUST order something for him today.

You’re online trying to sell stuff. Your mind is on the great price you offer on the new ‘Widget9000′ and the free shipping program you just launched.

I’ll let the Eisen-brothers tell you how to solve this mis-match (ok, a clue: align your selling with their buying, the other way around isn’t going to happen.)

But what does this have to do with keywords?

Up With People
Traditional keyword development and expansion is all about saturation bombing a category or topic. The suggestion tools and brainstorming techniques we’ve all relied on toss in (or try to) anything contextually relevant.

This is too low resolution and comes at the problem from the wrong direction.

Let’s think about it the other way. (IOW: What would Bryan do?)

Imagine a specific person, in their full psychological glory, in a specific situation who wants/needs/is curious about your product or offering. What are they likely to search for? Build the list of words and phrases that capture their needs given the details you’ve assumed.

Start with the most specific and detailed versions of what they might ask, and then slowly narrow it to queries that at least lean in their general direction.

Break down the components of the query – how might they reflect their product desires? How might they reference their urgency? What clues might appear to show that they prefer well-liked and popular products?

Stepping through the range of queries you can imagine, from deeply personal and unique out towards general queries that anyone might do. Taking this deliberate step adds another layer of clarity to each keyword. Some are deeply targeted and precise. Others are vague and broad. Shouldn’t your measurement, bidding, expectations, and text-ads align with these attributes?

Repeat this process for other kinds of people, or other reasons people might have, for visiting your site or buying your products/services. (By now you’ve gone and read the book and have built a full set of user persona’s right?)

Of course, most users won’t load their query with clues to every aspect of their needs, personality, and situation. But some will and more importantly this exercise creates the beginning of an intelligently tiered keyword list we can use to evaluate our campaigns and keywords with a new level of precision.

SEO your PPC
The idea of really thinking hard about the specific queries people are likely to execute is central to good organic paid search optimization.

In the organic world, where broad-match doesn’t exist, a page can only rank for a limited number of keywords, and there is a content+effort cost for each rank, the spray-and-pray approach isn’t practiced and certainly isn’t effective.

Never thought I’d say it, but when it comes to keywords, PPC folks can learn a lot from the SEOs.

Our friends Broad and Phrase and Exact just aren’t getting the job done anymore.

It’s not really their fault – the way people search has changed and they just can’t keep up. Or more accurately, we can’t keep up.

Here’s the problem. People are using more and more words in search queries. This has been the trend for a long time, and new data from Hitwise shows the greatest growth in search queries with SEVEN OR MORE words!

Changing number of keywords per search query

The growth and diversification of search queries do not work to search advertisers benefit. As queries get longer it becomes much harder to capture them via exact or even phrase match keywords, leaving only for possible acquisition by broad match.

And we don’t like broad match very much.

1. Broad match is imprecise. It attracts both highly relevant and highly irrelevant search queries.
2. Broad match wastes money. We pay for all the clicks that come from those irrelevant search queries.
3. Broad match lowers quality score. We get lower click through rates when our keywords are matched to irrelevant queries – many of which see that our ad isn’t for them and do not click.
4. Broad match lowers ad position. Google has clearly stated that exacts match before phrase which match before broads. Your broad match ad will only rank highly if few people bid on that query in phrase or exact form.

The Include Match Type
I’m sure there are a number of ways to solve this problem.

My suggestion would be the ‘Include’ Match Type. It would enable advertisers to specify a group of words, and then match to any search query which included those words, in any order. This attempts to correct a weakness of the current Phrase Match Type.

If I want to bid on lots of any search queries about dog food, and specifically target ‘dog food discounts’, today I might have to buy the following on phrase match:

• dog food discounts
• discount dog food

And of course I’d but ‘dog food discount’ on phrase and exact match too. (see Match Type Keyword Trap for the rational behind that.).

But a search query report (such as the excellent one provided by ClickEquations) would show me many long queries out there that this phrase match won’t cover, including:

• get dog food at discount
• discounts on dog food for puppies
• dog food los angeles discounts
• discount on purina brand dog food

A ClickEquations Search Query Report showing how queries are matched to keywords

You get the idea. What I really want to do is buy ‘dog food discount’ in the new ‘Include’ match type, so all of the above can be purchased and matched without having to fall to broad match.

And of course I’d add a lot of appropriate negatives to that ad group, tuning it over time by keeping a close eye on the search queries that are matched.

Times are changing Google. We’re spending money every day. Please give us better targeting tools!

What do you think? Any other good ideas for new Match Types you’d like to see?

Doing a little research and experimentation while preparing for SMX, I just came across a great example of one reason why this is true.

Look at the ads to the right. Which one is not like the others?

One of our clients sells products to help Fido keep himself together, and I did some searches on that topic. Then a search for ‘Premium dog collars’. That’s the search which delivered the ads you see.

Google however remembered that not long ago I was concerned with the other end of the animal, and slipped the Poop ad into the mix.

Had I clicked it, my search query of ‘Premium dog collars’ would show up, correctly, for the exact match keyword/phrase ‘dogs eating poop’.

Just so you know.

Heading to SMX in San Jose? Come see the new version of ClickEquations at our booth, or catch me in the Quality Score or Text-Ad Testing workshops.

• Google Suggest is now a default feature of Google.com. The impact here could be that people stop typing long detailed search phrases and instead just take one of the suggestions. The worry is that this ‘cuts off’ the long tail and will increase competition for those suggestion phrases. Read this for an in-depth analysis.

• Google Chrome munges the address and search boxes together so that you’re in effect encouraged to search and not type-in the URL. This drives more and more traffic through search, which places a premium on both your organic and paid results. It also hastens the trend to not bother remembering or bookmarking URLS because ‘it’s easier just to search’.

While both features are genuinely user-friendly in terms of Google enhancing the experience of people browsing the web, they both also happen to drive more money from advertiser pockets into the Google coffers.

Google Suggest will (I predict) lengthen what we call the ‘search chain’ – the number of different searches you do before you find what you’re looking for. Folks who had been searching on increasingly long phrases will be suckered into trying the shorter suggests, only to later go back and do the long search anyway at least for that large percentage of the time that the more generic searches yield interesting but unsatisfactory results.

Google Chrome’s search/address box will just increase search volume. Once they bundle Suggest in Chrome, then both search volume will increase and the number of queries per chain will increase. Another 1-2 punch for quarterly profits.

What Can PPC Advertisers Do?

Nothing to stop the features or trends. But what both demand is a strong need to know exactly what search queries users are typing, and how these queries are being matched to the keywords you’re bidding on.

If there is a new concentration of traffic from Google Suggest, only search query analysis will reveal it, as your various keywords and match type combinations will not make these trends visible to you.

If Chrome drives more search volume, that’s good. But if you want to know how it drove that traffic, again you need to be able to analyze search queries.

Keep An Eye On Search Queries

Search queries are the unfiltered driver of your traffic and your search spend. A keyword-centric view of PPC obscures this truth behind an matrix of keywords, match types, bids and quality scores that all combine and conspire in rather complicated ways to determine which keywords get the clicks and how much those clicks cost.

If you know which queries are driving your costs and revenue, you can better organize, select, and bid on keywords. Knowing them however, isn’t easy, as Adwords reports only a percentage of them and not at a keyword level. Yahoo and MSN, however, report no queries at all.

In ClickEquations we report all queries, and show exactly which keyword attracted each one, and which conversions resulted. It’s just one of many things we did differently because our years managing paid search accounts gave us a unique perspective on what a paid search tool should do.

ClickEquations isn’t available, hasn’t even really been announced, but we’re now accepting invitations for free ‘charter’ accounts. Wanna give it a try?

Now we come to the third issue: the productivity (or lack thereof) in making changes or improvements to your paid search account.

Possible Changes To Improve Search Campaigns

There are a limited number of things you might want/need to do to your paid search campaigns. Most of them aren’t too difficult when required on a small scale. But there’s not much in PPC campaigns that really happens on a small scale, which is where the frustration begins.

You might want to add keywords. It’s not hard to generate a large list of incremental keywords, and there are tools to help you do it. You can even harvest search queries, scape competitor websites, or get lists from Compete or Hitwise of terms driving traffic for others.

But to effectively apply a list of keywords they need to be expanded and parsed into versions and phrases and synonyms and layered across match types and segregated into ad-groups and campaigns and matched with bids and text-ads. The ideal environment for this would both facilitate the process as a whole and provide suggestions based on a learning algorithm which watched your style of division and targeting.

You could see the need to modify match types based on your search queries to build more effective match type keyword traps. This requires versioning keywords, segregating them into Ad-groups, pyramiding bids, and making sure the net is wide and lacks gaps or overlaps. Software could visualize this process and make it ‘drag and drop’ and even ‘bionic’ if someone put a little effort in.

Your bids may need to be changed, and of course this is the one task to which some substantial software automation development effort has been placed. This is a big topic I’ll save for a future series of in-depth posts.

You might need to substantially reorganize your campaigns. This happens for all kinds of reasons, many having to do with the impact of organization on the roll-up summary numbers as presented, some having to do with quality score management, the issue of match-type control and reporting, issues of geo-segmentation, and of course good old logical segmentation.

The technology provided for campaign reorganization today – cut and paste – is getting a little dated and I feel confident that a more elegant and productive solution could be conceived and developed.

The text-ads you’re running may need to be altered. While the idea of presenting four blank boxes and allowing unlimited freedom (with the constraints of available character limits) is powerful, perhaps there would be some advantage in tracking and analyzing the different ‘recipes’ used in various ads, building up repositories of different synonyms for important concepts and then making it easy to re-use effective ones and tracking how they perform both individually and as groups based on their relative position in the ad, in the ad as it runs at different positions or on different days, etc.

Lastly there is a chance that you’ll need to test different landing pages (leaving alone for now the implications of testing various designs within a single landing page). From the typical home page vs category page vs item page variances, it may be wise to consider user personas based on the keywords and queries and other factors as well.

Here again the current ‘type-anything-you-want’ technology could be enhanced by allowing simple meta data to be entered and tracked (how are item pages doing in terms of conversion vs category pages vs the home page) and enabling automated testing of these variations. And it doesn’t have to be limited to just a simple ‘which page’ consideration – performance may vary by the length of the query or number of works in the keyword phrase?, time of day, day of week, visit number, or many other factors. Software could track and optimize this.

Working In A Coal Mine

The common element in the current state of paid search management is that only one of the steps in even the most simplified version of the process has progressed even one iota in the last five or more years in terms of automation.

Tens of thousands of people are being treated as migrant-search-workers standing in the hot sun every day harvesting keywords and clicks.

And for the moment we’re not talking about the chisels and stones they’re given to bang out reports and dashboards.

Where is the Eli Whitney of PPC?

(Upcoming Events: I’ll be at the Semphonic XChange Conference in San Francisco on Aug 17-19, and am Speaking on “Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers” at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on August 19th)

There is a lack of clarity. It is amazingly difficult to get accurate and complete data on campaign performance and results. Much of the data you need to see is scattered across three to five different tools and interfaces. Other data is presented in formats or based on calculations that just aren’t right. (they’re wrong.) Still other information is seemingly unavailable. There is no quick and accurate way to get reports which are satisfying.

Since then I’ve written four posts in an attempt to explain and expand. But I’m not sure I captured it.

To manage something effectively it’s necessary to see cause and effect. The paid search networks use such complicated rules and hide certain key data elements which make this impossible.

Search queries, which are the primary driver of search success, are a key example. But it’s really the full relationship between queries and keywords and match types and quality score and text-ads and landing pages. The truth lies in that matrix somewhere, but nobody is letting you see it.

You see a pile of queries over here (partially, sometimes). A bunch of keywords over there. Some ads further off in the distance. Want to understand the relationships? Put them together in your own head.

Clues are great in a mystery. Not in a business transaction.

This is true, in part, because some important information is either unavailable or plays hard-to-get. Examples mentioned included search queries, information about missing clicks, and results in terms of true profitability.

This post drills down on search queries; the others will be covered in future posts.

Finding Queries
Let’s start with an assertion: It is not possible or reasonable to competently manage paid search campaigns without full access to search query details.

This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s required.

Managing without query details is like managing a baseball team without being allowed to know what happened at the plate. Suppose you’re told who gets on base and who doesn’t, but nothing else.

How do you rate or make changes to your batting lineup without knowing who strikes out, who hits deep long fly balls miraculously caught on the warning track, or who gets hit by pitches?

The analogy may not be perfect, but the point is that choosing to add, delete, change bids, add negatives, not add negatives, or modify match type without knowing queries is a bit of blind-folded juggling.

And yet, most people do manage paid search without full and detailed query reports – they have to because the data is not available to them. With very limited exceptions, you can’t get it from the engines, in web analytics software, or even in specialized paid search management tools.

Why Search Queries Matter (the short version)

Queries are vital because they can contain insight into the desire or intent of the user. If you sell tennis racquets, for example, and buy the keyword ‘tennis racquet’ (using the standard Broad Match) then your ad might be shown to someone who wants ‘tennis racquet restringing’, or ‘New Prince V14 Tennis Racquet’ or  ‘used cheap tennis racquet’ or even someone looking for ‘tennis racquet art’.

Are each of those people relevant to you? Are the ones that are relevant equally relevant? Can you write a single text ad that speaks directly to each of those people and persuades them to click and take action?

If you know the search queries that people clicked on when triggered by the keywords you’re buying, you can answer these questions and take action to improve the targeting and results of your account.

Without knowing, you’re left without the ability to fine tune your campaign, so you waste money and miss revenue opportunities.

Where The Queries Are(n’t)

When talking about this, I’ve found that people usually have either never thought much about the difference between queries and keywords, or have the impression that they do have access to that information but don’t use it aggressively so they haven’t realized the limitations in the little bit of query data they can access.

Let’s review what search query data is available in some of the most widely used SEM analytics and reporting tools:

• In Google Adwords the Search Queries report lists queries at the ad-group level, but it does not tell you which keywords triggered which queries. And they notoriously hide a massive percentage of them in rows marked ‘Other Keywords’.
• In Google Analytics does not display search queries at all, at least by default. It can be hacked to display queries, but from what I can see in the ones I’ve used you cannot see/link the queries to specific keywords (or even bucket them into adgroups).
• In Omniture SiteCatalyst & SearchCenter offer great query support if you purchase the optional ‘db universal’ VISTA rule (typically $5K). With this enabled you gain fairly complete search query reporting and it’s a metric you can use with the full power of SiteCatalyst reporting, meaning you can use the ‘break down by’ feature to subsort by query relating it to keyword, product sold, or just about anything. You can also access it via their Excel tool in powerful ways.
• In most stand-alone paid search management tools (like Clickable, Acquisio, SearchRev, SearchIgnite, Efficient Frontier, and others), search queries do not exist. They’re completely unavailable. These tools rely on the search engine API’s for data – they don’t have their own page/URL tags – so they just can’t get query data. Which means their customers don’t get it either.

There are many other analytics and paid search tools of course, and I don’t personally know the details of many of them. (I believe Marin Software does have their own tags and can gather query data, but I don’t recall the level of reporting, for example.)

If you know the details of available or unavailable query information and reporting, please leave details in the comments.

Missing Data 1, Good Search Reporting 0

Based on this review of the popular platforms people use for paid search reporting, it seems safe to say that the vast majority – probably at least 90% and maybe as many as 98% of search managers do not have the ability to look at which queries drove clicks (and spent their money) on a keyword by keyword basis.

Imagine if your sales records only told you what categories of items you sold, not which specific items or SKU’s were sold. How would you decide on inventory re-orders or future promotional plans. You couldn’t with any level of accuracy so you’d have to just guess and play the averages.

This is what the search engines want you to do. Your inefficiency is their profit margin.

It’s hard to understand why the web analytics and focused paid search software companies place such a low priority on this vital information. I have some theories, which I’ll share in future posts.

A Fair Shot

If it’s the search query/keyword combination that triggers ads, causes your money to be spent, and dramatically clarifies the ‘why’ of who clicked and converted, why should paid search advertisers have to manage their accounts without this information?

I suggest you ask your search engine account managers, or analytics / PPC tool providers that question.

• A lack of clarity (reporting problems)
• Difficulty defining priorities (strategic and planning problems)
• Horrible inefficiencies (mechanical and processes problems)

I believe that these problems need to be solved in order to improve paid search management, both the profession and the results.

First you need to see what’s happening, then you’ll want to decide what needs to be done, and then you can hopefully get it done with a reasonable amount of effort.

That doesn’t sound like too much to ask.

But 4-5-6 years into explosive growth in paid search and we’re hardly out of the starting gate. Today I’ll expand on the issues regarding reporting and clarity, and in future posts dive more deeply into the problems of setting priorities and executing paid search tasks.

What Paid Search Reports Don’t Tell You

Paid search is about answering questions. People type queries and search engines return results, which are lists of possible answers to the questions they believe are being posed. I want to structure my campaigns as tightly as possible around those search queries.

Every search engine tells you how many impressions your ads had, and how many clicks you got. They have to I suppose, since the CPC is what drives your billing. What I really want to know is what did I miss? And why? Then I can set goals and define strategies or tactics (or at least design tests) to do better.

Each conversion hopefully generates more revenue than it cost to cause that conversion, which is reflected in the rather innane ROAS metric. Being impressed with a good ROAS seems akin to believing you’ve saved money by buying something you didn’t want when it was on sale. Goods or services have costs (COGS) and the only metric that matters is ROI taking account (at least) both direct-marketing and goods/services expenses.

When my clicks do generate revenues, I’d like to know which ones. Then I can make wise decisions about future investment and effort around certain keywords and queries.

Unreasonable Demands?

So I’d like to know which search queries generated which results, how many clicks I didn’t get and why, the actual amount of profit made on each transaction (and from each keyword, query, and click).

Do any of these sound unreasonable? Far-fetched? Demanding?

Yet these desires are not generally or specifically fulfilled through the paid search reporting capabilities provided by the search engines, popular web analytics software, or even specialized PPC management tools.

Surprised? The devil is certainly in the details, and some of the information defined is available in some packages/places, but generally with huge compromises and limitations that disqualifies or invalidates them as actual or sufficient information.

Really? Yes to the best of my knowledge, as the next post will review in somewhat excruciating detail. I’m happy to learn new facts or discuss this further in the comments – significant corrections will be appended to that post.

User search queries, accurate revenue & expense allocation and matching, and ROI reporting are just three of the ways that the current generation of PPC reporting generally fail paid search advertisers and managers.

The fact that these problems/limitations are seemingly not well known, frequently discussed, and therefore clammored for as improvements is one of the things that has to change to move the business/market forward.