One of the most common mistakes that can be made to any search campaign is shutting down keywords without understanding the role it plays in your overall Search Campaign. Imagine it’s Game 7 of the NBA Finals and Jerry Sloan sits John Stockton because he isn’t one of the top scorers. Overall production for the team would fall because you are losing 10.5 assists a game.
This same scenario is what occurs in many PPC Campaigns during the Optimization process where advertisers pause terms that are simply not converting. A common mistake is the lack of research into the engagement metrics and mapping of your conversion cycle. To understand the role that your keywords play, you must first understand the conversion process for search. The very basic search conversion funnel has three phases:
• Browsing
• Shopping/Researching
• Buying/ Decision Making
Each phase will have a different set of keyword and ad copy strategy to help maximize your efforts from search. By cutting off traffic from a portion of this cycle, you run the risk of cutting off your keyword conversion funnel. An example of this, would be the following scenario:
1st search: cosmetics (browsing)
2nd search: mascara (browsing)
3rd search: waterproof mascara (shopping)
4th search: Blinc brown mascara (Buying) * Converting Term
Reviewing the search funnel above, you see the branded term is what gets credit for the conversion, however the assist terms all played a major role in “assisting” the conversion process. Many advertisers fail to take the assist terms into consideration when optimizing their account performance and see the end result, overall conversion falling. In the 2008 Marketing Sherpa Shared Knowledge report it was stated that:
By tracking assist conversions, we determined that customers take about 2 days from the first time they click on a paid ad to the time they convert….many of our conversions consist of customers that have searched using 2 to 7 different keywords. Customers are doing their research!
So in keeping with the metaphor being used, understanding each role of your keyword list (players) and using them for the greater good of your account (team) will allow you to maximize your returns (win the championship). If not, you will be stuck with a team full of overpaid and underachieving Prim Donnas, just look at the NY Knicks under Isaiah Thomas…..
All very true… it makes me wonder why Yahoo is the only major PPC platform that bothers to try to track assist terms, when they are of such obvious importance. A LOT of ppc analysts completely forget about the buying cycle and are so caught up in getting the conversion, they forget that it may take a shopper three or four weeks to get to that point in their personal decision-making. If you don’t account for the research and browsing, you can really shoot yourself in the foot, like we saw with your cosmetics example, which, sadly, I had to witness first-hand…
That particular client lost 25% of all their conversions each month for three months straight before they saw the light. I hope reading this article will save someone else all that lost revenue.