Friday, June 11, 2010

Building an Effective SEM Keyword List: Avoid the folly of first time marketers

When building out a keyword list, resist the urge to put in everything and the kitchen sink.
I Want Everything AND The Kitchen Sink – The folly of first-time marketers
As its name implies, the strategy here is to cover all grounds possible by having a leave-no-stone-unturned mentality. In this method, the marketer chooses to instruct the agency to include all kinds of keywords in the initial list. This includes keywords that are even very remotely related. Let’s take for instance, an imaginary auto insurance campaign.

Marketer: the term "wedding" should be included in the list

Agency: I would advise against this, since the product and the term are not closely related.

Marketer: “What’s the problem with this? In our research, couples who are getting married soon will also be buying a car, and would hence need auto insurance…”

Agency: “Yes…there is a percentage that would, but it is going to appear irrelevant to majority of people who are getting married and not thinking of buying a car at all. Also, Adwords is essentially an auction system – our ad would be competing against advertisers who are promoting wedding services for couples about to tie the knot – wedding planners for example.”

Marketer: “Ok. But this is pay-per-click right. So if they don’t click, I don’t need to pay. Simple. So what’s the problem?”

Agency: “Well, the Adwords system ‘rewards’ the more relevant ad by showing it more often, and the less relevant ad less often. After some time, our ad will stop showing for the “wedding” terms and will develop a low quality score.”

Marketer thinks: What was all that geek speak! Anyhow, I’M the Boss. So he should listen to me.
“Whatever. We’ll deal with that. (Cooks up some excuse to justify)…Just add it in.”

Agency: Erm...ok boss…


Imagine the two ads below.

Keyword search:
“Wedding”

Ads:
Planning your Wedding?
Buying a family car soon: Motor
Insurance Plan from $1 Per Day!
www.motomotorinsurance.com
Latest Wedding Dresses
Latest Designer Wedding Dresses of
2010 Just From $60,Shop Now!
www.weddingdresses.com

Perhaps one in a thousand people who are getting married are thinking of buying a car. But a definite higher percentage, say, one in a hundred, will be looking for wedding gowns.
Click through rate of Auto Insurance ad = 1/1000 = 0.1%
Click through rate of Wedding Dresses ad = 1/100 = 1%

The term “Wedding” in the Auto insurance marketer’s campaign will thus have a lower quality score and stop showing. It will also lower the overall account level quality score, impacting the performance of the whole campaign.

I’ve chosen to make this a rather far-fetched example, but truth be told, this creeps up ever so often in campaign setups, especially for first time marketers using the medium.

The good thing about the paid search model is that it is pay-per-click. Inherently, if there are no clicks, you do not get charged. But exercise caution when building out keyword lists, and when in doubt, keep it tight.

In my opinion, the way to go about building a robust paid search keyword list is to have:

- product terms

- category terms

- complementary terms

But that’s for another post.