Marketing Optimization: Success for Negative Keywords

I’ve written in the past how important it is to measure success.  You don’t know if your campaign/search/ad/etc. is working unless you measure if your visitors are doing what you want. Initial traffic volume doesn’t matter if none of the visitors buy your products.

One variation of this is looking at your organic search report to improve your PPC campaigns.  Let’s look at an example.  Say our company sells bunny boots (real item, not rabbit feet).  So we have “Bunny” and “Boots” as our PPC words.  Looking at our search key word report we see:

When we look at a search phrase report instead of a key word report we realize that the last set of visitors was really looking for:

Not known for his foot wear.

In normal use we concentrate on the top lines of the search report as our best words.  But we end up paying for curious cartoon rabbit lovers clicking on the link.  Not that we mind if they buy shoes, but are they?  What if we add a success measure to find out the actual behavior of the bugs clicks?

Our ad is coming up for the “bunny” word that we wanted.  But we are paying for clicks that are not potential customers when it is combined with “bugs”.  The critical part is the Sales column – they are not buying our boots.  Without knowing the sales or success of the term we don’t know if it is a good or bad term.

Now that we know it is a bad word what do we do?  Most PPC search vendors support negative keywords.  The ad does not display if one of the negative words is in the search even if a positive one is.  By adding a success measure we find negative keywords that drive traffic but no conversions.  We are looking for words with high traffic and low conversions.  In this case by using “bugs” as our negative keyword we make the clicks we do pay for more effective. 

This is a simple example.  Your own search/success report can help you find search terms that you don’t want to be paying for.