Choosing Correct Keywords for Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Before setting up any PPC campaign, we need to know exactly what the objective of the pay per click campaign is. If your website is selling online or looking to generate leads, choosing the right selection of keywords will be imperative to making your PPC marketing efforts a success.

Let us use the travel industry as an example of how to choose a selection of terms. In Pay Per Click advertising, there are generally three types of keywords that are used to cover the online buying cycle. There are, generic, specific and niche terms.

Generic terms consist of terms such as “Cheap Flights”, “Cheap Holidays” or even a popular holiday destination such as “Tenerife”. The good thing with generic terms is that they will bring you critical mass in the form of large volumes of traffic but these keywords will generally drive the lowest conversion rates as they are too broad. If you are on a modest budget then its best not to use too many generic terms as you will find that your budget gets exhausted quite quickly. You may want to only include a handful of terms just to have some sort or presence on the sponsored listings. Generic keywords such as those mentioned above form part of the “research stage” of the online buying cycle when users are just looking for what is available out on the market without knowing too much about where to go. It’s really all about what’s going to ‘catch their eye’ so they can move onto the next stage which would looking at a particular destination.

Below is an example of Ad Text for the term “Cheap Holidays” for a Google AdWords campaign. Short, sweet and straight to the point with a strong call to action although most generic terms do not convert too well

Cheap Holidays
Find Superb Cheap Holiday
Deals – Book Online & Save!
www.myholidaysite.com

Specific keywords could be terms such as “Cheap holidays to Spain” or “Cheap Flights to Greece”. Specific keywords generally consist of phrase based terms. The good thing with these types of keywords is that a visitor will have an idea of which holiday destination they are looking to travel to. If your business offers holidays, flights or accommodation to certain destinations then using the Google Keyword Selector Tool will allow you to ascertain relevant keywords and allow you to build a targeted and relevant inventory of words. Specific terms are a good way to drive a great deal of traffic as well as a modest conversion ratio.

Niche terms often drive the highest level of conversions but they drive very little volume. Therefore, a good strategy is to build a comprehensive list of as many niche terms that are targeted to your service offering as possible. This way you can drive as many targeted users and improve your overall conversion ratios.

For example, if a visitor knows that they want to book the “Jumeirah Beach Hotel” in Dubai and this is part of the hotels on offer, then we should target the search term “Jumeirah Beach Hotel” and all relevant variations we can think of. As long as the bid amount and ‘Quality Score’ is sufficient to keep the Ad on the first page, when a user types in the above term, our Ad should show up.

An example of niche terms are individual hotel names, specific location names within cities, venue names etc.

Because niche terms are so highly targeted, they often convert better. It is safe to assume that the user has carried out some prior research on the hotel property name for example and is at the stage where they are ready to make a booking or at least are a genuine potential customer. One must therefore ensure that at stage when the user is ready to part with their cash that the landing page that they click through to is very strong and makes the whole clck to conversion process as easy as possible.

Hopefully the above information should have given an insight into how important PPC keyword selection is. Is it imperative that the right choice of keywords and terms are chosen. This is vital to the success to the campaign. The right keywords will help drive sales and leads, the wrong selection will ensure lots of click wastage and very little conversions.

Good Luck and Happy PPC-ing.