Low Click-Through Rate Culprits and What You Can Do About Them (Part II)

Choosing keywords is really about striking a delicate balance, isn’t it? 

If your chosen keywords are too broad, you may see success in increasing your click-through rate (CTR), but at the same time, you’re running the risk of unqualified traffic driving up costs and bringing down your return-on-investment (ROI).  If your keywords are too narrow, not only will your CTR suffer, could be missing out on impressions and clicks that might lead to a sale, newsletter sign up, etc.   

What’s a PPC advertiser to do?

My recommendation is to scrutinize your keyword list not only as it stands on its own, but as it will align to your ads and the landing pages those ads will point to.  Relevance is absolutely crucial when designing your Microsoft adCenter campaigns; it can make all the difference… not only in terms of CTR, but in keeping costs controlled and ROI high.  To get the most out of your keywords, keep the following in mind:

Speak your Customers’ Language:  While you may be intimately familiar with your product and feel quite confident in being able to identify the terms you’d expect someone to use in a search to find your ad, you might be surprised by what Made to Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath refer to as “the curse of knowledge”. 

The brothers Heath hypothesize that the more you know about a certain topic, the less effective you are in communicating that knowledge to an audience that’s unfamiliar with said topic.  This can be painfully true when it comes to selecting keywords… but fear not, Dear Advertiser!  With helpful tools like Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and adLabs’ Keyword Mutation Detection, you don’t have rely solely on your own expertise to get a handle on what terms your customers might be using to find you. 

Recognize and Prepare For the Fluidity of Language: Anyone who originally comes from an area with its own regional dialect can understand the subtle nuance of slang.  I’m originally from Boston, a city famous for not only our R-dropping accents, but for words that don’t make sense to anyone but us.  If you go to the ice cream shop, you might ask for sprinkles on your cone… I’d order jimmies.  Coming to a circle of traffic, people here in the Redmond area call it a roundabout, but it’ll always be a rotary to me. 

No doubt there are a few pitfalls when it comes to choosing keywords in a world where the language fluctuates in tandem with the market.  To stay ahead of the curve, check the press, both national and local, and do a little research in the social media space for new terms that might be applicable to your campaigns.

For more tips on managing your keywords, visit Diran Hafiz’s two recent posts, SEM Intermediate Series: Keyword Research and Expansion for Microsoft adCenter Campaigns and most recently, SEM Intermediate Series: Keyword Organization Best Practices.  Stay tuned to the adCenter blog for his next post on the topic of keyword analysis.

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