Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [237]
Match Ads to Keywords
One of the first keys to developing a successful campaign is to target your ad to the keywords. When setting up the campaign, you select the keywords that searchers would use to find your business products or services. When you select these keywords, your ad will show up in the search results for those words. PPC also offers the benefit of creating multiple ads for different keyword subject matter. Start by choosing the keywords around a specific concept, and then you will be prompted to create an ad that will display when those words are searched in the search engine.
In developing your ads, consider your target audience, the searcher. When you bid on specific keywords, your ad needs to match the keywords as much as possible in order to be relevant to the searcher. Making your heading, ad copy, and display URL match up with search keywords enhances the visibility of the ad. This also enhances the quality score of your ad, because it closely matches the keyword.
Including a compelling offer, such as a discounted price, free shipping, or other offer will also provide a reason for your ad to stand out from the rest and capture the attention of the searcher. Consider all of these elements when creating your ads, and don’t waste your money by displaying irrelevant ads with no matching keywords. You’ll pay higher bid rates with a poor quality score and lose visibility at the same time.
Bold Matching Words
PPC ads are similar to organic results, in that the matched search terms are bold in both the organic and paid results. Remember the study on bold search terms and click-throughs that was referenced in Chapter 7? That study (Beyond Position Bias: Examining Result Attractiveness as a Source of Presentation Bias in Click-through Data from Yue, Patel, and Roerig, 2010) showed that results that display bold terms that most closely match the search phrase typed in by the searcher will also increase the likelihood of that result being clicked by the searcher.
Figure 19-1 shows that many advertisers don’t follow this simple guideline. In these results, the number-one ad is Cabela’s; however, there are no matching terms bold in the result. Neither the title nor the ad copy display any content about fishing poles. So, despite showing up at the top of the list, there is no relevant information given to the searcher that matches their intent! Of all of the ads being displayed, this ad is the only one that does not match any part of the search term.
Figure 19-1: PPC search results in Google for fishing pole
This will affect the quality score of the ad, because it is not clearly relevant to the search term. This will reduce the quality score, because the ad also sends people to the Cabela’s home page and not a page about fishing poles. Neither the ad, the landing page, nor the keyword term show consistent relevance among the campaign factors, which causes Cabela’s to pay more for this prominence as opposed to another advertiser with a better quality score that may be spending less for similar visibility.
In viewing the rest of the ads for the keyword phrase fishing pole, only two match the full two-word phrase: Dicks Sporting Goods and Emmrod. Of those two, only Dicks Sporting Goods matches the search phrase in both the title and the ad copy. Some of the ads show only Fishing in the title but not in the ad copy, which shows some relevance. This lack of accuracy and focus on the keyword phrase seems very strange considering that this is a very popular consumer item. A good ad grabs the searcher’s attention because it matches their search phrase and their intent.
Ad Copy That Makes Sense
Even stranger is the type of ads that appear to be strangely off the mark. The Target.com ad shown in Figure 19-2 displays results for Fish Poles. What exactly are fish poles? Similarly, Gander Mountain displays an ad for a Hunting Pole, which is even more confusing.
Figure 19-2: Target ad is for Fish Poles, and Gander