Bounce Rate: Your Single, Most Important Metric Re: PPC & Web Analytics

You can't do search engine advertising without web analytics. At least, you can't do it well. Getting the click from the search page to your web page is just the first step; everything else depends upon your analytics.

If you can't move your visitors
beyond the landing pages, you
can't close the sale.

Web analytics isn't rocket science. It isn't even quadratic equations but it can seem complicated. There are so many reports, so many metrics. Which ones are important, which merely clutter? For search advertising, the first metric you need to pay attention to is bounce rate. It's not the only one but because it's the first one, it's one you need to get right.

What's in a Bounce?

A bounce is defined by adCenter Analytics as a single page view per session. That's typical of most web analytics. What concerns us with search advertising is the bounce rate for a landing page. If you can't move your visitors beyond the landing page, you can't close the sale.

The value of having a unique landing page for every campaign, if not every ad group, should be immediately obvious. Sending loosely related campaigns to the same landing page muddies your view of visitor behavior and visitor behavior is what you're trying to influence.

The question then is how do you move a greater percentage of your paid search traffic off the landing page? At this point, it doesn't matter where they go, as long as they don't leave your site. Eventually you hope they'll go to your checkout page but at this stage, it's small steps. The goal is simply to reduce the bounce rate per landing page.

If your paid search engine campaign
is poorly targeted, you're paying
for the wrong audience.

If the question is how to reduce bounce rate, the answer is targeting. Targeting is simply pitching your offer to the right audience, a receptive audience. Targeting, like every other aspect of search engine advertising, is about relevance. But the answer leads directly to another question. How do you identify the right audience?

The Demographics of Success

Identifying the demographics of success can be a powerful tool when targeting your search engine advertising to the right market segment. Both adCenter and adCenter Analytics incorporate demographic data; adCenter reports demographics for both impressions and clicks while adCenter Analytics reports demographics per page.

What are the demographics of your visitors who become customers? In adCenter Analytics, check the demographics of your confirmation page. Admittedly only a minority percentage of your customers will have demographic data, typically 20%-25% from my limited experience, but enough to safely assume that the balance of your online customers probably share a similar distribution. If most of your sales are made to men age 35-49 but the demographics of your landing page indicate your paid search traffic is mostly young women 18-24, it's a clue that your paid search campaign is poorly targeted. You're paying for the wrong audience.

Once you have a clue about your audience, how do you target them in your search advertising campaigns? And how do you measure success?

Getting There

Within adCenter you can incrementally boost your bid by demographic for visitors with known demographic data. For example, if your target audience is men age 35-49, you could have adCenter increase your base bid by a percentage you designate, say 35%, whenever the system positively identifies the visitor as belonging to that demographic. The higher bid rate places your ad higher on the page for that specific visitor, increasing the likelihood of a click. And since that demographic is more attracted to your offer, they're more likely to move off the landing page, reducing your bounce rate.

The same principle applies to geographic targeting and day parting. Do you have a higher conversion rate for paid search referrals from a particular location or section of the country, a particular time of day or even day of the week? Again, you can incrementally boost your bid and raise your ad position to attract your target audience while still competing for the balance of the traffic at your base bid.

Are you being too clever
for your own good?

Conversely, you can use negative keywords to exclude those visitors mistakenly attracted to your landing page by some unanticipated semantic relationship to your positive keywords. For example, if you advertised for the Paris Hilton Hotel, you could expect a lot of tangential traffic. Blocking that traffic from ever seeing your ads is the purpose of negative keywords.

And don't forget the slant of your ad copy. Are you pitching your ad clearly to your target audience, identifying the value proposition that resonates with your demographic, or are you being too clever for your own good?

Make incremental changes to your campaigns and closely watch the bounce rate for the campaign's landing page. If your change reduces the bounce rate, integrate it as a best practice for that campaign. If not, lose it. Online advertising is about experimenting, testing, and reviewing the data. Your web analytics are an integral part of that cycle.

The Bottom Line

The synergy between paid search and web analytics creates a feedback loop that can ratchet up the impact of both your search advertising and your web site. The tight integration of adCenter and adCenter Analytics allows you to test and track the performance of your search campaigns, making course corrections like a rocket in flight, but adCenter Analytics also works with traffic referred by other search engines, both paid and organic. It's exciting stuff that starts with a bounce.

Qualifying Traffic with Negative Keywords

In a previous post (Different Engines, Different Tactics), I made the point that different tactics may be more effective for different search engines. In short, it's all about traffic volume.

Microsoft offers the opportunity to bid aggressively
on your core keywords, head terms rather than tail terms,
but there is a risk.

Marketing to the long tail makes more sense where high traffic volume supports the cost of maintaining large keyword inventories. If you're experiencing lower traffic, Microsoft, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to bid aggressively on your core keywords, head terms rather than tail terms, increasing your number of impressions served to an audience that is known for high conversion rates. There is a risk to this tactic, however.

Exposing your ads to a less qualified audience, people not really interested in your product or service, can result in decreased in CTR or worse, increased bounce rate on your landing page. CTR is critically important to your quality score and, consequently, your ad's position on the search page. Low CTR will cost you a higher bid amount to reach the same position as a competitor with higher CTR.  And a bounce, someone who leaves your landing page after only a few seconds, costs you money without hope of a return. The short and simple version; low CTR or high bounce rate wastes your money.

Obviously, there's strong incentive to ensure you're displaying your search ads to the right audience. Long tail tactics such as exact match on keywords with multiple words serve as a strong qualifier but they also severely restrict the size of your audience. Targeting head rather than tail terms increases the audience size but requires different qualifying tactics.

The Paris Hilton Conundrum

Imagine you're managing search marketing for the Paris Hilton hotel. How to you target your ads to people actually looking for a room rather than the infamous heiress? One of the most powerful tactics to pre-qualify your audience is negative keywords.

Negative keywords are compiled much the same way you would positive keywords but for the opposite reasons. While doing your keyword research, you'll notice certain keywords returned for your queries that are completely unrelated to your product or service, keywords that are never likely to convert.

False positives, the exclusion of queries
truly relevant to your product or service,
are a risk when choosing negative keywords.

The Keyword Group Detection tool created by Microsoft adCenter Labs (adLabs) is useful for researching both positive and negative keywords. Paris Hilton returns an interesting list from the tool.

Fred Durst
Pamela Anderson
Jenna Jameson
Katie Price
Brittany Spears
Anna Nicole Smith
Beyonce Knowles...

Frankly, I need a tool to get a clue. I have no idea of Paris Hilton's relationships, no pun intended, but the Keyword Group Detection tool provides the connection. If I were managing the hotel's campaigns, I'd think seriously about including this list among my negatives. It might be even more efficient and just as effective to include only the last name in the string since the hotel might run hard against the adCenter negative keyword limit of 100 characters per keyword and 1,024 characters total.

You can associate negative keywords at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels at the same time but only one level will be applied, in order of decreasing granularity, from keyword to campaign. Negative keywords applied at the keyword level take priority over all others; ad group negatives trump campaign negatives.

Another useful resource is adLab's Search Result Clustering tool which returns semantically related groups of words. In our example, likely negatives might include "heiress, model, actress, whitney, sex, nude, gossip, jail, celebrity..." Then again, celebrity might be a dubious choice since the hotel could legitimately be associated with celebrities. False positives, the exclusion of queries truly relevant to your product or service, are a risk when choosing negative keywords.

In adCenter, negative keywords aren't subject to editorial scrutiny. You can stuff your negative string with obscenities or competitors' trademarks with blissful disregard. After all, you're telling the engine you don't want your ad displayed for these objectionable or unethical keywords.

The Bottom Line

If you're pleased with the conversion rate of your adCenter campaigns and want to increase the number of impressions your ads receive, consider focusing on the head rather than the long tail of your campaigns. Focus on a few terms that are the core of your business, terms with broad appeal, and bid to place them on the first page of the search results but spend time building a bullet-proof set of negative keywords to qualify your traffic. Negatives applied at the keyword level are the most granular, the most specific, and the most powerful but also the most time consuming to identify. As you're testing this strategy, you can always place a daily limit on your campaign budget as a safeguard.

Negative keywords may be the most direct method of qualifying your audience but there are others - geographic and demographic targeting, dayparting, bid boosting -that I'll talk about in the last post of this series.

Different Engines, Different Tactics

We hear from some adCenter customers that they'd like more traffic; in this post I'll be sharing some tips to maximize and potentially increase your adCenter traffic to make the most of the time you spend in adCenter.

Some advertisers optimize their pay per click campaigns for other engines and then export them with little change to adCenter. This may save time, but it doesn't always optimize for the distinctly different character of Microsoft's traffic. In other words, you may be leaving a pile of money on the table.

In the real world there's a substantial difference between
running a campaign with a thousand keywords
or a half million.

When the Long Tail is Short

Everyone's heard of the long tail. Loosely translated, it means low volume sales can still be profitable if a lot of different items are sold. In search, that means campaigns with huge keyword inventories where each keyword receives precious little traffic individually. In aggregate that traffic becomes substantial.

The profitability of the long tail assumes a low cost of sales. In the real world there is a substantial difference in the investment of time required to run a campaign with a thousand keywords or a half million. Here's a short list:

• Keyword research (positive and negative)
• Configuring URLs with tracking parameters
• Refreshing creative
• Bid management for ad position
• Segmenting traffic by demographic, geographic, and day part
• Bid boosting for qualified traffic
• Optimizing CTR and CPA
• Identifying highest value leads
• Testing changes to landing pages
• Analyzing web analytic data by PPC keyword

And the list isn't even definitive! The costs associated with campaign management make advertising to the thin end of the long tail less attractive and less profitable.

Some advertisers may find that Microsoft may have less traffic but, as I've said, it tends to be profitable traffic. The difference in conversion rates is dependent upon market vertical (your mileage may vary) but it is consistent.

Microsoft's traffic shouldn't be ignored,
just treated differently.

Optimizing for Microsoft adCenter

When exporting your campaigns from another engine into adCenter I'd suggest you favor your core keywords -- keywords with high volume and high CTR. The high volume ensures the keyword is a head term; the high CTR ensures it's a keyword relevant to your business. When working with your long tail terms, make sure they're worth the cost of maintenance. If you don't maintain them, if you don't continually refresh and optimize your campaigns, they're going to be less effective no matter where you advertise.

Secondly, adCenter represents an opportunity to bid aggressively on more general keywords -- one or two words with broad match type enabled -- qualifying your traffic with negative keywords, a clear value proposition in your creative, targeting, and bid boosting.

Let's say, for example, you're an online florist. You've probably bid conservatively in the past, typically on keyword strings of three or four words, typically with exact match but sometimes daring to use phrase match, your ads placing somewhere near the bottom of the second page  but often pushed to the third or even fourth page. Now you want more -- more impressions, more clicks, more sales. More, more, more! (Queue the maniacal laughter.)

You're thinking about bidding on the keyword "flowers." You're not a big brand name, however. You're on a tight budget. On some platforms, aggressively bidding for first page ad placement on such a general keyword would likely devour your monthly budget in a matter of hours like some necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria, for the rest of us). If you're seeing lower volume on Microsoft, however, aggressively bidding on more general keywords might be more manageable; the higher conversion ratio might also make it more profitable. Again, your mileage may vary.

The Bottom Line

If you're focusing on the long tail of the snake with other engines, consider focusing on the head if you're seeing lower traffic with adCenter. In all cases, closely monitor your key performance indicators (CTR, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition) to avoid being bitten.

Increasing the number of impressions for your head terms may also reduce your CTR or increase the number of unqualified clicks, neither of which is desirable. There are several techniques you can use on any engine to qualify your traffic and some unique to Microsoft. I'll cover those in my next post.

Keyword Research Tips From Tor Crockatt

I’ve just spent the day at the International Search Summit at the British Library in the heart of London.

Delegates from all over the world were attending to get a better understanding of how to market globally using search engine marketing. Marketing in multiple languages can be fraught with pitfalls if you’re not careful, so most were there to pick up a few tips.

I may be biased, but my favourite presentation was from our own Tor Crockatt. Tor is our Editorial Operations Manager here in Europe and is a whizz when it comes to ad copy, linguistics and how to think about which keywords are the best to select when building a campaign.

During her session she made some very helpful points:

• You have to make the keyword relevant to connect your audience with your products in the most effective way and this challenge multiplies when you expand into multiple languages.
• Think of keywords as questions being asked by a user. You’re engaging the user by drawing them in to your site. Be honest – do you have the answer to their question? Remember the quality of their experience can affect your brand positively.....and negatively!
• Think about what you are actually selling and don’t expand your keywords so much that they don’t relate to your content. For instance if you sell bath tubs, don’t be tempted to bid on keywords for shower equipment just because they do the same thing.

Follow these keyword research steps:

Think of your keywords as a pot of coins. It’s not how many coins you have in the pot that’s important; it’s their value to your campaign; this value is dictated the type and volume of users they connect you to:

Do your keywords bring you….

• The right volume of Customers?
• Customers looking for your products?
• Customers ready to buy?
• Customers your competitors haven’t tapped?
• The opportunity to present your Unique Selling points directly against competitors?

Analysis around user intent on generic keywords is key to understanding the users’ request. Some keywords have multiple options as to precisely what the user is asking:

When translating and localizing campaigns, keyword analysis becomes more complex and user intent will vary per market. Using qualified local search marketers is the best option, but if you are using translation tools start simple! Translate basic concepts or nouns first and then use keyword research tools to expand and find variations. If translating nouns, try using the plural as you are most likely to get the meaning which corresponds most closely to the search user’s usage.

Another structure that may be useful is trying to spot elements of meaning in the keywords that you are using, for example your keyword phrases may include: quality elements (compare, best), price adjectives, product adjectives, product names/types, manufacturer/brand names, words that indicates intended use (for him, back to school), intended action (buy, book) or a location/place name. If you can see the typical structure of meaning in your keywords, it becomes easier to think up more variations. This may also give you a framework with which to localise.

If you bear these concepts in mind when setting out on your pay-per-click journey you’ll create a much better experience for the user, put your ad in front of customers actually looking for your products and services more often, which will enhance  your brand. You’ll also save money because eradicating those wasted impressions and clicks will result in higher click-through rates for your keyword/ad combinations and better ROI.