Show Me The Money: Following The PPC Keywords That Make Dollars & Sense

Keywords and search queries can mean different things to different people. That’s where intent comes in. You might, for example, have one keyword that serves multiple personas.

So the work that you need to do to qualify those leads in a PPC environment typically happens at the ad creative and landing page level, not necessarily with the PPC campaign structure.

My agency recently inherited a PPC account that was building campaigns based on personas, and the strategy didn’t prove itself. (By the way, if you’re interested in the cabinet of curiosities we discovered when we got into the account, check out my column from last month.)

Using this account as a case study, I’ll share with you some important lessons on understanding keywords, what to do when they serve more than one audience type in PPC and what results you can see when you reorganize based on the moneymakers.

The Situation: Misguided Campaign Structure

The business in question runs on licensing and continuing education for a particular industry. So the company wanted to target two distinct personas based on those two different groups.

The previous PPC account managers had separated the campaign structure based on audience personas: continuing education seekers and new licensees.

That sounds okay at the outset, except the keywords that were in the continuing education campaign were some of the same keywords that were in the new licenses campaign — and frankly, any of them could cater to either audience.

Here’s an example of how it was structured:

Continuing Education Campaign
dog walking continuing ed
dog walking renewals
dog walking licensing

New Licenses Campaign
dog walking licenses
dog walking courses
dog walking license tests

For the continuing education ads, searchers landed on a page that catered to that side of the business, and for the new license ads, they landed on a page with info specific to that.

But the thing is, it was a crap shoot. Any new licensee or a person seeking continuing education could come in via “dog walking courses,” for example.

So in the off chance they did convert on a particular landing page, in my opinion, it was pure luck.

The Fix: Follow The Money

When we dug into the account, we rolled up our sleeves; we had work to do. And we did what we always do: Follow the keywords that are making the business money.

The client was at first hesitant and wanted to continue the way they had been: campaigns based on personas. (We did get past that.)

Once we restructured the campaigns with the keywords that drove traffic and conversions, we refocused the ad creative and the landing pages (our messaging strategy catered to both possible personas), and let those do the work of qualifying the personas:

The Results: 123% Lift In Revenue

With a little love, the account experienced a huge lift in conversion rates, transactions and revenue for the client year over year. We suspect this will only get better, as we are still testing our strategy and adjusting it as we go.

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• A 39-percent lift in conversion rates.
• An 84-percent lift in transactions.
• A 123-percent lift in revenue coming from PPC.

The moral of the story is this: PPC managers and online advertisers need to do the work to understand the intent behind the keywords, and then work that insight into various steps in the funnel.

That starts with ensuring the account structure is sound, following the keywords that are showing the most ROI, and then using marketing insights to make the ad messaging and landing pages guide the audience down the path to conversion.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Pauline Jakober

Pauline Jakober is CEO of Group Twenty Seven, a boutique online advertising agency specializing in the Google AdWords and Bing Ads networks. As a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Jakober and her team practice cutting edge paid search strategy and management for clients across many industries.