So knowing this, when it comes to landing pages why would you want to cram as much choice in there to confuse and paralyze people from taking action? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on one product, service or offer at a time?

Too Many Options on Your Landing Pages Gets You Less Conversions not More

Let’s take the example of an ecommerce site that sells running shoes. Let’s say the site sells all the major brands and models. Now a great landing page would be one where one specific brand or model is listed and nothing else. But more often than not, we come across landing pages that prominently feature one model while also listing a variety of other models a visitor can choose from – supposedly in case they don’t like the main model shown on the page. If the owners of these landing pages would conduct a path analysis in their web analytics solution, I’m sure they’ll find that a significant amount of visitors will click on the other models and will go on browsing multiple models only to exit the site completely without buying anything. Why you ask?

Because now they have a choice to contemplate before buying. So instead of making it easy for them, landing pages with too many choices will cause them to hold off and “sleep on” their decision before committing to a purchase. They tell themselves “I’ll come back later when I have more time to go over all these options”. And of course most never do.

To make matters worse, among those that do buy, many will not be quite happy with their purchase because they have it at the back of their minds that maybe they didn’t make the right choice.

So now that it’s clear that more choice leads to fewer conversions and more buyer’s remorse, get out there and make your visitors happy by giving them fewer choices on your landing pages!

Your sales team will thank you.

10/10 Quality Scores and Double Digit CTRs

We’ve experimented with this strategy on a number of new campaign launches in the last few months with astonishingly positive results. The quality score across most, if not all keywords tends to be anywhere from 7/10 to 10/10. And in several cases CTRs have held steady in the double digits for a relatively good amount of traffic.

Maintaining a solid CTR is critical to keeping your quality score high and CPC low and this is especially true when a campaign is new and has no history. Once you have some momentum built up, you can slowly begin introducing some broad match keywords to gain incremental traffic, but keep a close eye on the search query report to make sure that you filter out any irrelevant search queries through the use of negative keywords. I recommend checking this at least once a week for campaigns with larger amounts of traffic and at least once a month for smaller campaigns.

Expanded Broad Match – Or Almost Anything Goes

Google has been known to open up the floodgates in campaigns containing broad match keywords through their expanded broad match feature to the misfortune of unsuspecting advertisers. That said you’d be surprised (not pleasantly) to see what kind of queries some of your ads are showing up for because of this. All the more reason to watch the search query report like a hawk once you’ve got some broad match keywords in your campaign.

If you’re using Google analytics you can take things one step further and set up a custom filter to see the actual search queries that your campaign is triggering ads to appear on. Jason Billingsley has put together a really simple tutorial on how to do this on the Get Elastic blog.

Let me know how this tactic works out for you.

But simply including all keyword match types in your campaigns for each and every keyword will not always make sense to do. You might actually find that broad or phrase matched keywords outperform exact match keywords and bring in better quality traffic on the same keywords. How so? Let’s take a couple of examples using AdWords:

EXAMPLE 1

Let’s say you sell blue suede shoes and bid on all keyword match types of blue suede shoes as follows: blue suede shoes, “blue suede shoes”, [blue suede shoes]. By looking at your Search Query Report or web analytics software, you might discover that you are getting traffic for people looking for the song “Blue Suede Shoes” made popular by Elvis. So you add in negative keywords like “elvis”, “song”, “lyrics”, “cd”, etc. to filter out people searching for the song and not actually the shoes you sell.

But these negative keywords won’t help you eliminate this traffic if you’re using the exact match keyword [blue suede shoes] since negative keywords don’t impact exact matched keywords and you’ll be getting impressions and even traffic for both people looking for the shoes you sell as well as the famous song. So you might be better off not using the exact match variation of this keyword as targeted as it might seem to your product.

EXAMPLE 2

Let’s say you repair Toshiba photocopiers and run a campaign with keywords like “repair toshiba”. You might find that your click through (CTR) and conversion rates are doing well on the broad repair Toshiba and phrase “repair toshiba” keywords but not on the exact matched [repair toshiba]. Especially if you have in place a good list of negative keywords to filter out people searching for repair services for Toshiba products you don’t offer like “toshiba laptop repairs”, “toshiba DVD repairs”, “toshiba TV repairs”, toshiba projector repairs”, etc.

In this case, including the exact matched [toshiba repair] is almost the same as using the broad matched version of the same keyword without having any negative keywords in place. Said differently, someone typing in “toshiba repair” exactly will not always be looking for the service you offer – Toshiba photocopier repairs.

So including the exact match [repair toshiba] as a default strategy will cause you to inadvertently get traffic for people searching for Toshiba repairs, who are not looking for Toshiba photocopier repair services as described above. And since you’re using an exact matched keyword, you have no way to filter out unwanted traffic from it short of simply not using it.

Why is this important? Two words: Quality Score

Even if you’re not wasting money from people clicking on your ads that are not looking for your service, your click through rate (CTR) will likely be very low and over time you might notice that your quality score is dropping on these keywords. This will create a spill-over effect where your minimum bid prices will rise as your quality score decreases. Google is sending you a message that you are not relevant enough and will now have to pay more to have your ads displayed on your exact matched keyword – a keyword that just by match type you might have thought was targeted!

So be sure to go over your existing exact matched keywords to make sure you aren’t targeting people who aren’t interested in your services. You’ll be able to spot some of these by a lower than average CTR especially where there is a high number of impressions.

We come across many businesses that struggle with this challenge so here are 5 ways you can better measure how your PPC Campaigns are actually performing.

1.  Serve Different Phone Numbers

Use javascript on the landing pages to identify the source of the traffic (Ex: Google Adwords, Y!SM, Microsoft Adcenter – you could even go more granular to the campaign level depending on your needs) and serve up a unique phone number so that when a call is taken you’ll know how they found you.

This strategy uses cookies so that as visitors navigate your site, the same phone number is shown to them (You’ll want to make sure that you use persistent cookies rather than session cookies so that the same phone number will be displayed to the same visitor upon repeat visits from them).

2. Use Different Pricing

Display different pricing on your landing pages where you change something like the last digit in the price depending on the PPC campaign that drove the visit. Ex: $199.99 for Adwords, $199.97 for Yahoo and $199.95 for Microsoft Adcenter.

3. Use Offer / Coupon Codes

Include offer or coupon codes on your PPC landing pages that visitors can use on the phone or bring in to your bricks and mortar (offline) stores. The only way visitors can get these coupons is if they came in from paid search traffic or if someone who did passes on the coupon code.

4. Dig Into Analytics

If you’re an ecommerce based business that still gets a lot of sales offline by phone, you can often spot trends to help you see how your paid search campaigns are influencing your offline sales.

For example, we discovered that one of our clients had a higher than average bounce rate on one specific brand and they confirmed that their phone sales were also soft for this brand. After exploring further we discovered that they were not competitively priced so we stopped advertising on this brand and shifted their paid search budget to better selling ones.

Result: Average order value doubled and they hit their previous month’s sales revenue in half the time after the switch.

5. Ask Your Customers How They Found Out About You

This is not very scientific, but will give you an idea over time how people are finding out about you. If they came in from a search engine, they most likely will be able to tell you which one and maybe even what they searched for. Granted there are still a lot of people that don’t know the difference from an organic listing to a sponsored one so you’ll still want to use the above strategies to get a clearer picture.

These strategies will help give you a clearer picture of the true value of your paid search campaigns. So before you pull the plug on your campaign or declare “My campaigns are not working!” give them a try.

Using a similar strategy or completely different one to track offline conversions generated from your PPC advertising? We’d love to hear about it – as would our readers so be sure to add a comment!

I recommend testing a combined strategy that covers a comprehensive range of long and short tail keywords. This often works well to acquire incremental traffic and business. In addition, shorter tail keywords can have the effect of improving long tail performance and can get potential customers to your site before they even hear of a competitor who isn’t employing this strategy.

What are Short Tail Keywords?

Short tail keywords are keywords that are broader or more generic in nature, the opposite being their long tail cousins which are more targeted and specific. For example, a chain of luxury hotels operating in various locations across the globe, might employ the use of such long tail keywords as “luxury hotel in Sydney Australia” for their Sydney location but might also want to use such short tail keywords as “Sydney hotels” or even just “Sydney” to cast a wider net. This strategy sounds dangerous and risky but it doesn’t have to be.

How to Implement and Test

A short tail strategy does have its risks and should be implemented in a controlled environment. I recommend placing these keywords in their own campaign with a separate budget so that they don’t negatively interfere with your main campaign. Starting with a lower bid price and position to minimize the cost of and exposure to less targeted traffic would be advisable. At the same time you want to make sure to have a good list of negative keywords added to the campaign if you plan on using broad and phrase matched keywords.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the campaign especially at the beginning so you can weed out any inefficiency quickly. Such inefficiencies include keywords that are driving a disproportionate amount of traffic and eating up most of the budget which doesn’t allow for proper testing on all keywords in the campaign. At the same time you’ll want to measure the direct effect on your long tail keywords. Often you’ll find that the presence of short tail keywords increases the performance of the long tail ones directly. You’ll be able to see this depending on the traffic volume your campaigns capture. You should conduct further testing by isolating higher traffic keywords to see what impact they directly have on your long tail keywords.

Why This Strategy Is Worth Testing

There is a bit of psychology and common sense involved in the reason why a combined short tail strategy works. Most people begin their search using broader terms and then refine their search queries when the results generated are too untargeted. So there is a good chance that they will click on your ad if you are offering them what they are looking for before they have to refine their query and search again. Even if they don’t click on your ad after searching on a broader query, you may benefit from the additional impressions and exposure at this stage of their research, causing a stronger association with your brand on subsequent searches and an increased likelihood of getting a potential client to click through to your site.

Conclusion

As with any pay-per-click strategy, testing and experimentation is a key factor to success. So be sure to simultaneously test not only a variety of short tail keywords but different match types as well as highly targeted ads that work to filter out untargeted traffic. From experience I’ve seen that the type of industry that you’re in and the type of product or service that you offer can largely influence the success or failure of such a strategy so results will definitely vary.
Tried this strategy and it worked/failed for you? We’d love to hear about your experience!