Having a well-known brand can be a huge asset when it comes to search marketing – simply including every conceivable variation of your brand terms should be one of your top priorities to ensure the highest visibility for your campaign. But what if you don't have a well-known brand, or what if you do, but you've already built out your brand keywords and you're not seeing the traffic that you're sure is out there for the products and services you offer? The next step is to focus on expanding your non-brand terms.
The Purchase Funnel
The first step in getting your non-brand keywords built out is to take a step back and look at your campaign from the perspective of the consumer. Let's say you sell consumer electronic equipment and you want to move some of your inventory of flat screen TVs. While there will be searchers who are entering in the obvious non-brand terms like "flat screen TV", "DLP/LCD/Plasma TVs", "HD TVs"… there are also a wealth of terms that aren't as obvious.
Consider what marketers refer to as "the purchase funnel" – what chain of events might bring a consumer to arrive at the point where they're shopping for flat screen TVs? Perhaps they're putting an addition on to their home for a new media room – chances are, a new media room means new equipment to go in it. Maybe they're avid gamers and are looking for TVs that will offer the most realistic graphics. Perhaps they're planning a big Super Bowl party… what better time to invest in that 60'' flat screen they've had their eye on? It could be worth your while to do some keyword research on terms related to media room construction, TVs that have earned rave reviews from video game fanatics or sports fans.
If you're not already familiar with the Microsoft AdCenter Labs site, now is a great time to check it out. There are a bunch of really cool tools available there, like Keyword Forecast (for impressions and demographic predictions), Keyword Mutation Detection (frequent misspellings or alternative spellings), and Keyword Group Detection (based on a word or phrase, find similar sets of words). The one I'd like to call your attention to, however, is the Search Funnels tool. By typing in a keyword, you can see all the queries a searcher typed in before arriving at that specific keyword, or you can reverse it you see all the queries entered after a keyword was entered.
Keyword Expansion
Once you have some ideas of different paths a consumer might travel down on their way to making a purchase from you, the next thing you'll want to do is explore the keywords that will be most relevant to linking those events with your TVs. One way to do some basic research is to log into your adCenter account, click on the "Research" tab and experiment with different terms to see what kind of impressions are showing up for your terms. I just did a quick check on "media room" and found there were over 200 searches for that keyword over the past 2 months!
While this tool is useful for some preliminary research, when you're really ready to dig in to your campaigns and expand out your lists to reach their full potential, you might be interested in the new adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007 that was released in January. It's an amazing tool; we've been using it internally for several months now and I can't say enough about how quick, easy and painless it makes the keyword expansion process. If you're interested in giving the Add-In a test drive, you can find more information, including the link to download it here (NOTE: use of the Add-In requires Excel 2007 – a free 60-day trial version is also available at the Add-In info/download site). Be sure to check out the five tutorial videos to get the most of out of this newly released tool!
Another resource for keyword expansion are the Microsoft adCenter Labs free keyword and content analysis tools.
Account Structure
So you've got your keyword lists built out, now you want to structure your campaign so when you run your performance reports, it's showing you data that will be helpful in determining what's working well and what needs tweaking.
At the campaign level, your best bet is to separate out your brand terms from your non-brand terms – this will help you not only in terms of reporting, but also so you can allocate budgets based on what’s performing best.
At the ad group level, break things out into buckets that make sense. Following the previous example, in the non-brand campaign, I would suggest using "Media Room Construction", "Video Games" and "Sports" so you can tailor your ads to address those specific audiences. I'd recommend the same for the brand campaign, breaking them down by brand names so you can identify ad groups that are performing well and which ones need your attention.
For your ads, don't be afraid to try out different ad copy to find out what's going to work the best. Having just one static ad is a surefire way to inhibit your campaign's performance. A best practice is for every version of ad copy you come up with, run 2 ads for it – one static and one with dynamic text (at least in the headline if nowhere else).
Targeting
If you own a brick and mortar store and don't do online sales, then you'll want to use the targeting feature (at the bottom of the page after clicking on the ad group) to ensure that your ads aren't being shown to shoppers who are outside of your immediate area. You can target by demographic, country, region, specific cities, days of the week and even specific times of day.
Although all of this seems like a lot of work, it's actually a pretty interesting process. Search is a powerful advertising medium that offers the opportunity to directly engage with your customers. By seeing what they're searching for, you can learn how to best position yourself to help them find what they're looking for…YOU!
Good luck!
Tina Kelleher – Media Specialist, U.S. Ad Services