Step Wise SEO

PPC and ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is one of those fancy terms for a very simple concept: how much are you getting back compared to what you’re putting in?

Everyone wants a bigger, better ROI, and the best way to achieve one is to work within a framework that we like to call the ROI loop:

Let’s say that over the past several weeks, you’ve invested both money and time in your PPC campaign. This won’t be enough. You need to move on to the next steps. We’ll get you started on some new endeavors even as you take stock of older ones:

PPC Sanity Check
Organic Apples and Oranges
A/B Testing
Close the PPC ROI Loop

PPC Sanity Check
Do you know about “algoholics,” those people who obsessively follow the organic search engine algorithms?

We see two new SEO disorders: obsessively cutting out low-performing keyphrases because you can’t stand the clutter (we call this PPC-OCD) and the inability to stop making little campaign changes (this is PPC-HD).

The purpose of this article is twofold: First, to give you some guidelines on how to “read” your PPC data like an expert, and second, to encourage those of you with itchy trigger fingers to make changes to your campaign without sabotaging its success.

Your PPC Sanity Check starts with lining up your PPC keywords from best performing to worst.

Here we assume that you have identified your top performing PPC keyterms based on your own criteria.

Probably you chose to order them by click-through rate, conversion rate, or some combination of the two.

Using the same criteria, you’re going to take a look at your entire PPC keyword list and decide whether it makes sense to delete any keywords.

As you look through your data, you may find that there is a fairly even spread of clicks or conversions throughout your list of keywords.

Or more likely, you may find a nice group of performers at the top and a steep drop-off thereafter. Perhaps you even have a disturbingly long list of zero-performers.

But is it really time to prune your PPC campaign? Probably not. Before you give in to your slashing instinct, take the time to apply some solid analysis.

Here are the most common performance failures and possible ways to improve them:

• Keywords with low click-through rates
• Keywords with low conversion rates

Keywords with Low Click-Through Rates
Higher click-through rates will influence your rank on both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), so you may be tempted to start slicing and dicing keywords with low click-through rates.

But while you may find these keywords bothersome, you’re paying for clicks, not ad views, so they aren’t costing you extra money.

Ask yourself a few questions that may help you turn these low performers around:

Is my ad text doing its job? Take an honest look at your ad copy to make sure it addresses your low-performing keyterm, and your audience, in a meaningful and compelling way.

If the keyterm doesn’t have its own custom-written ad, perhaps it should. Consider inviting another writer on your team to give your ads a tune-up.

Or you may want to experiment with an A/B split (Click Here to learn more on this), which is an experiment that can help you get the most from your ad text.

Does the term have enough impressions for me to make a judgment call? Make sure you’re getting enough ad views for your doubts about the keyterm to be valid.

Sometimes, the number of impressions for an ad is so small that it’s really not getting a fair shot at success.

This is especially true if the keyterm is related to a seasonal or cyclical topic. Terms on the “long tail” of search, are naturally only going to get a very few impressions.

Did I start out with realistic expectations? This is a great time to reassess your trust in your PPC service’s traffic prediction tool.

Low Conversion Rate Keywords
Much more worrisome than the ad that isn’t bringing in traffic is the one that actually is bringing in traffic but not resulting in conversions.

You’re going to hold these terms to a much higher standard than the low-click-through performers because every one of these clicks is costing you cash.

But you may wish to give these underachievers a second chance before you dump them.

Here are some questions you should ask:

Is the landing page a good match for the keyterm? You may be about to drop a keyterm when you should instead be planning to add a new page to your website to better accommodate it.

At the very least, consider pointing a keyterm to a more appropriate landing page that already exists.

Exploring different landing page options with an A/B split may also be in order.

Did I get caught in a word-matching snafu? If you are using a broad matching option, is it possible there’s a broad match to your term that’s drawing in the wrong audience You can fix this with a negative match, a type of matching that excludes words you specify so that your ad doesn’t show up for those terms.

For example, you may want to sponsor the term “shredder” for your snowboarding site but you probably don’t want to pay for clicks from people who are looking for those paper-eating office supplies. In this case, you’d want to exclude the words “paper” and “document” for this keyword.

Am I inadvertently using bait-and-switch tactics? If you owned a bike shop in Santa Cruz, California, you might think it’s perfectly reasonable to sponsor the search terms “santa cruz bikes.”

Unfortunately, this is also the name of a popular brand of mountain bikes! Many of those click-throughs are going to be disappointed by your site.

If you’re in a situation like this, you’ll need to review your ad text to eliminate ambiguity. Make sure your ads clearly represent your offering.

Determining the value of a conversion is anything but straightforward. Let’s see two perspectives.

One says, if you’re paying for advertising, you need to have a way to determine if it’s worth the cost.

That means giving a numeric value to your conversions! For larger organizations, your marketing department probably already has a concept of the lifetime value of a new customer or client.

For example, the PPC visitor who buys a digital camera online today may come back in a year for spare parts, and then recommend you to a business partner for a large purchase three years down the road.”

The other perspective says, if your type of conversion is less tangible-for example, a visit to your Map and Directions page or downloading a white paper-you’ll probably be hard-pressed to place a numerical value on it.

This may be a case of’ I know it when I see it’-your gut will tell you that $10 per conversion feels like too much but $5 feels OK.

If you can’t place an exact value on your conversion, the best approach is to manage your campaign diligently so that you stay within your PPC budget and strive for the lowest cost per conversion possible.

Organic Apples and Oranges
Here, you’re going to look for stand-out successes and unexpected disappointments among your PPC keywords so you can use that knowledge to adjust future organic SEO efforts.

Why use PPC data to inform organic SEO? Because PPC provides data in a much more tangible form, quickly, and with less investment of labor than organic SEO.

With a quick scan of your PPC keywords reports, you can gain broad-brush insights like these:

• Your original keyword research led you to believe that a term is popular with searchers…but is it really? The number of PPC impressions it gets can help you confirm your suspicions.

• A keyphrase seemed targeted when you first assessed it …but is it? The number of click-throughs/conversions a term receives can give you a clearer understanding.

• A keyterm didn’t make the cut for your organic top-priority list…but maybe it should have.

If a term is a standout PPC success, you may have underestimated its organic potential.

Even with reams of PPC data in your hands, you may not arrive at any one finding or number that will make you say, “Eureka! I should change my organic approach in this way!”

But you can still just say, “Eureka!” for fun if you want. It’s good for morale. Factors such as low rank, less-than-stellar ad copy, or landing page problems can throw off any of the preceding “broad-brush” judgments.

Today, you’ll use your PPC campaign data to judge the keyword choices, looking for over- and underperformers that may need to be reprioritized. Here’s what we look for:

• keywords Clusters
• Standouts and Disappointments
• Net Steps for Your Organic Campaign

keywords Clusters
Your PPC keyword assessment starts with reviewing the performance of clusters of related keywords.

You can define a cluster as a group of stemmed keywords “hangover cure,” “natural hangover cures,” “curing hangovers”.

Or a group of conceptually related keywords e.g., a “preventing hangovers” cluster vs. a “curing hangovers” cluster.

This can give you an idea of the context in which your target audience is most interested in seeing those keywords.

You need to develop a suitable PPC Cluster Worksheet then follow these steps to assess the performance of keyword clusters:

• Sit down with a list of your top-priority keyphrases and your PPC report spanning the life of the campaign.

• Go through your report and decide how you want to group your keywords into clusters.

It might help to highlight different clusters in different colors as you go. You can define as few as two clusters or as many as you’re interested in studying. It’s OK to have leftover keyphrases that don’t fit into any cluster.

• For each of the keyword clusters, copy total clicks and overall click-through percentage on a keyword-by-keyword basis into the PPC Cluster Worksheet you prepared.

Or, if your conversion tracking has been in place long enough for some real data, enter total conversions and conversion percentage. See the tables below for examples.

• Use your PPC service to find the campaign-wide total number of clicks (or conversions, if that’s what you’re reviewing here).

And the PPC Cluster Worksheet will calculate the percentage that each cluster is receiving. ???

Keep in mind, an accurate apples-to-apples judgment along these lines depends on the ranks for these terms being similar.

Standouts and Disappointments
There are lots of variables that get in the way of comparing PPC to organic performance. PPC and organic keywords are shown in different screen locations, in different contexts, and with different advertising messages and levels of keyword matching.

Since the majority of searchers do not click on PPC results, you’re not getting a full picture of the search population. But there are some things that PPC cluster data can tell you about your organic campaign:

Did you optimize for the right keyphrase variation? If you weren’t sure whether you chose to use the right variation of a given keyword (e.g., “silk screen” vs. “silk screen printing”), this might give you enough data to convince you to make some edits to your landing pages.

Did you focus on the right user scenario? Personas and scenarios are just ways to structure your thinking about your targeted audience and what you want them to do on your site.

Looking at the data from the PPC keyword clusters, you might be surprised to see that one cluster is much more effective than the others (for example, the “monogram” cluster is getting more clicks or conversions than the “embroidery” cluster).

Next Steps for Your Organic Campaign
Now that you’ve gained some fresh insight on how your PPC keyphrases are performing, you’ll use it to “close the loop” and adjust your organic campaign accordingly.

Did you find any keyterms outside of your original organic top-priority list that have any of these characteristics:

• Have a high conversion rate, even though they may have only a moderate number of impressions so far

• Are slightly more focused versions of your top-priority keywords, and are coming through with noteworthy clicks and/or conversions

• Just appear to be logging a promising number of impressions

On the other hand, were there any terms from within your original organic top-priority list with these characteristics:

• Logged few or no impressions

• Had plenty of impressions but no click-throughs

• Brought in lots of clicks but had a low conversion rate

Does a place exist for these new terms on your site right now? Maybe they’re already well matched with a landing page and it’s just a matter of inserting them into the text and meta tags.

As you incorporate new keywords into your organic efforts, you may want to drop underperformers from optimization and tracking.

Whether you start modifying your organic efforts today or put it off until your entire team reaches consensus will depend on your personal and organizational preferences.

A/B Testing
Civil engineers know that the best kind of earthquake testing for a building is this: a real earthquake. A/B testing is a way to get that type of real-world information for your SEO campaign.

Commonly used in the direct mail industry, A/B testing (also called an A/B split) is a practice of sending out two different advertisement designs and comparing their sales.

On the Web, A/B testing can be used to compare the conversion rates for PPC ads, for landing page designs, or even for two different “Buy Now!” buttons.

There are several ways to approach an A/B split. Read through the following options and determine which one best fits your campaign.

• A/B Testing: Proper
• A/B Testing: Practical
• A/B Testing: Page-Based

A/B Testing: Proper
A scientifically robust A/B test would follow these steps:

• Create two identical PPC ads.

• Point both ads to the same landing page.

• Let both ads run for a while. The period of time (be it a day, a few days, a week, or even longer) before they are both showing approximately the same click-through or conversion rates is your testing period.

• Keep one ad the same throughout the test this is called the A ad).

• Make one edit to the other ad (for example, change “Purchase low-cost dental insurance” to “Purchase discount dental Insurance”).

• After each edit, wait one testing period. Did the change increase or decrease the ad’s performance (either click-throughs or conversions? Don’t forget to keep records!

• Try again with another edit.

• Lather, rinse, and repeat. With each testing period you learn whether the edit will help!

The scientific approach is great, but we know the real world rarely presents the opportunity for ivory tower-style research. And that’s why we’re hoping you’ll look into the approach described next.

A/B Testing: Practical
If you’re using Google AdWords, A/B testing for PPC ads is easy! Just write one or two additional ads for each of your Ad Group’.

As clicks come in, Google automatically judges which ad is more effective and will increase its prominence for you automatically.

If you have Google Analytics in place, you can use a ready-made A/B testing function for comparing the effectiveness of two different ads.

AB testing on YSM takes a little more determination because you can’t run two different ads for the same keyword at the same time.

Instead, try testing your AB split over consecutive testing periods rather than simultaneous ones.

A/B Testing: Page-Based
If you have a conversion tracking system in place, you can pursue a landing page A/B test. Here’s how to compare the effectiveness of two landing pages for the same PPC ad:

• Find a PPC ad that’s been running long enough to gather meaningful performance data.

• Build a new landing page for use with the ad. This should be an “orphaned” page, one that doesn’t have any links to it other than from your PPC ad.

For meaningful testing, you don’t want this page to be indexed by the search engines, so exclude it using your robots.txt file. (To learn how to do this, Click Here.)

Let your designer have fun with graphic text; this page doesn’t need to be robot friendly.

Since you know that the audience for this page is a little more “qualified”-that is, they clicked a specific PPC ad-make sure the copy is tightly focused to that audience.

• Now, sit back for a testing period and assess: Is the new PPC landing page delivering more conversions than your original landing page did for the same ad?

Some campaigns find that the extra level of targeting that is possible with a PPC-only landing page translates into more conversions.

Does A/B testing have its limitations? Of course it does. You may figure out that one ad is doing better than another, but unless you interview your target audience, you’ll never know exactly why.

And if you’re only measuring click-throughs, and not the outcome of the visit, A/B testing sure won’t tell you what those clicks are worth.

In addition, your tests are limited to your ideas for edits, so unless you’re a master at thinking outside the box, there may be big improvements that you miss.

Nevertheless, A/B testing is one of the few ways of getting real data on the persuasiveness of your SEO message.

Close the PPC ROI Loop
You’re going to start a new “invest” cycle in your PPC ROI loop here. You’ll drop the duds-unsalvageable low-performing keywords-from your PPC campaign.

And you’ll line up some promising new PPC keyterms and adjust bids based on performance data so far.

Add New PPC Keyterms
Adding a few new keyphrases to your PPC account is a fairly flexible process. You can do this in any number of ways:

• Use your PPC service’s keyword tool to suggest additional terms.

• Grab some more terms from your preliminary organic keyword list that didn’t make the cut for top-priority optimization.

• Go for the “long tail” and add some longer, highly focused versions of existing terms.

Adjust Bids Based on Performance
If you have PPC conversion tracking in place, you can adjust bids based on conversion performance.

If you found any unexpectedly high or low conversion rates among your PPC keywords, you may wish to increase or decrease your bids for them today. Adjust bids for keywords with unexpectedly high or low conversion rates.

Drop the Duds
At this point, you have a good sense of which keywords are pulling their weight in your PPC campaign.

You also know which ones may deserve a second chance. Now you’ll drop any that are working against you. Here are the keyterms we call “duds”:

• Low or zero click-through-rate terms that are costing you more in administrative work than you think they’re worth tasks that eat up time include appealing an editorial decision, closely monitoring aven- expensive term, or just performing routine management on a campaign that has grown too large over time

• Terms for which you’re paying more per conversion than your estimated conversion value

• Terms that don’t accurately represent your offerings

If any of these factors are true, then go ahead and slash. You can always add them back later if you regret your choice.

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