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There are a lot of theories on the best practices to manage a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign from how to target keywords, what ad text to use, and what to put on your landing page.  Many of these theories pose good arguments and it’s almost impossible to nail down “the perfect” strategy.  Therefore, I thought I would spend some time on identifying some techniques that, I believe, haven’t been done to death and are great resources to use when every thing is not all rosy…negative keywords.

In short, negative keywords are keywords that you can add to virtually any PPC campaign that you don’t want your PPC advertisement to appear in your search results.  In general, most of the PPC campaigns that businesses set-up (and what most PPC vendors want you to use including Google) utilize broad matching.  Using broad matching simply means that your chosen keywords may appear for more key phrases that searchers may use to find your website.  For instance, if you chose to broad match the keyword “minnesota resorts,” your PPC advertisement may also show up for “best minnesota resorts,” another relevant keyword that you likely would want your ad to show up for if you were a Minnesotan resort owner.  Unfortunately, if a searcher also searched for “best alexandria minnesota resorts,” your ad may show up and get clicked on even if you don’t service that area.

To avoid this above scenario, you can add negative keywords to your PPC campaign that will restrict your ad from showing up in search results for which you do not wish to pay.  In most search engines, you can do this by simply adding a keyword to your list with a
“-“ in front of  them. For example in the scenario above the negative would appear as
“-alexandria.”  There are likely some very obvious keywords that you may want to negatively target such as but not limited to: free, ideas, information, guaranteed, jobs, etc.  However, to be really successful, you’ll need a little help from your website analytics.  If you don’t have website analytics installed on your website, there are many great solutions on the market that are free.  If you need some help, I have a post on how to choose website analytics here.  Simply put, I suggest using Google Analytics because it’s not only a great free resource, but also a solution that many businesses have chosen to use  because it integrates well into Google’s popular PPC Adwords program.

Regardless of what analytics provider you choose, you’ll need to know how to identify which keywords you are paying for.  In Google analytics, you can do this by clicking on Traffic Sources => Keywords => Paid.  Typically speaking, I suggest using a quarters worth of data (3 months) to analyze your results so that you get enough data to determine what to negatively target.  Now here’s where the secret is revealed!  From this screen, you will be able to see what keywords are actually clicked on…not just what you intended to purchase.  Look at this list to see what keywords may potentially not be good keyword buys.  There will also be some keywords that are no-brainers.  However, some may not be so obvious.  So, to drill down deeper, you can review each keywords “bounce rate,” “page views per visit,” and “time on-site” to determine if the searcher actually found what they were searching for was relevant to your website.

The bounce rate is a percentage of how many people went deeper than the page they landed on and went back to the search engine.  A percentage of 100% means that all the people that clicked on the ad didn’t go further than the landing page.  Typically speaking, you should look at analyzing keywords that exhibit bounce rates over 30%.  However, two other numbers are also as equally important to factor into your analysis.  They are “pages view per visit” and “average time on-site.” Page views per visit, generally refers to how sticky your content is.  A number over three (for sites that aren’t image heavy) generally means that people are finding the content to be relevant.  Another statistic that also relates to relevancy is how long the visitor stays, AKA- the average time on site per visit.  Unfortunately, there is no secret formula for using these three statistics, so you will have to rely upon your own expertise to find which keywords don’t best represent your products or services.  Always remember, that paying for search engine traffic is not as much about quantity as it is about relevancy.  The longer searchers remain, continue to view pages, and don’t bounce back to where they came from, means that they are engaged and that they are likely finding the information, services, or products for which they were searching.

Your job as the PPC ad manager is not an easy one.  As you can see, to determine which keywords are not worth spending your advertising budget on goes farther and deeper than your pockets or just using your intuition.  However, if you can find the bulk of these non-desirable keywords and put them on your negative keyword list, you will be able to reduce your waste coverage while increasing your ROI.  Best of all, your website visitor experience will increase as more of these searchers find the target at which they are aiming.

As the financial economy continues to looks meek, I thought I would take this as an opportunity to discuss some tips on how to lower your shopping cart abandonment as we near the holiday season.  Whether you are looking to increase conversions or improve customer shopping satisfaction, here are some great tips to make your website more conversion friendly.

According to a 2007 MarketingSherpa study of 1,923 e-commerce respondents, the average shopping car abandonment rate is around 52%.  In lemans terms, this means that on average, 52% of consumers that add a product to a shopping cart, ultimately don’t make a purchase.  Although this statistic may appear high, it has actually dropped by nearly 10% from the previous year suggesting a general movement towards lower shopping cart abandonment. As a website owner faced with many decisions, one of them should be to increase output given a fixed (advertising spend) input.  As such, this same study also suggested the following top 3 most effective strategies for improving conversion rate:

• Testing shopping cart design & purchasing experience
• Tweaking internal search functions
• Testing product / feature copy

This is not to say that these will be the most effective for your shopping experience scenario, but they are good indicators where you may want to focus your efforts.  In addition to the above, here are some micro-strategies for addressing the above:

1. Show Progress- include a progress bar to show people what point in the check-out process.  This helps consumers visualize how many steps they have left.
2. Make it obvious- nothing is worse than having a shopping that doesn’t know how to check out.  This can be as easy as just changing the text on buttons to make it more obvious what to click next.
3. Make it Easy- review your checkout process and identify unnecessary steps.  A common pitfall is having a consumer add tedious information twice for their billing and shipping information that could be best solved with a “shipping information is the same” checkbox.  Additionally, you may consider including an add/remove feature helps shoppers update quantities within the shopping cart. 
4. Promote Vitals- don’t play the shipping cost surprise game at the checkout unless you want dissatisfied shoppers.  Equally as important is promoting exchange and return policies during the check-out process to ease the shoppers mind. 

The above tips may not appear “game changing” to some, however as we have come to know that little differences can add up to a lot.  Moreover, if adding any of the above components were to lower your shopping cart abandonment or increase your conversion by a small margin.  It could potentially translate into thousands if not millions in increased revenue over time without the added expense of spending more on advertising.  Lastly, the above scenario also could potentially improve customer satisfaction which ultimately lengthens the lifetime value of each customer and thus equates to more revenue in the long run. 

If you haven’t prepared your shopping experience for holiday season, there is still is plenty of time to stay in the game.  Review your shopping experience carefully and I believe that you may find a few extra bucks in your stocking.