PPC keyword buying strategies comparative funnel

It’s a triple bonus in that your paid search budget is smaller, your conversion rate is higher, and your quality is better.

A ‘shotgun’ strategy gives you more clicks, but fewer conversions. ‘Surgical’ buying gives you fewer clicks, but more conversions.You want a vertical funnel. It’s that simple. Think lean and tall and you’ll get more out of the bottom.

Wide funnels get very narrow at the bottom because what’s coming in at the top is so far flung. There’s a vague, possible connection in the wide mouth that translates to very few qualified people making it through to the bottom.

The narrower mouth is very different. When you’re specific at the outset you pay for far fewer superfluous clicks. That’s good in and of itself, but what’s better is that you get more people down through the bottom of the funnel. Why? Because they’re more qualified when they click in the first place. It’s a triple bonus in that your paid search budget is smaller, your conversion rate is higher, and your quality is better.

Garbage in, garbage out

A wide spread of keywords is going to attract a wide spread of people. Aside from the fact that the keywords themselves are very loosely connected to your business, you then have to deal with their context and the variance of perception that goes along with that context. Those two factors — vague connections and wide context — lead to you paying for a very high percentage of useless clicks. Perhaps more importantly, this approach makes it very hard to attract the right people to click. So there’s an opportunity cost to it that compounds the inefficiency.

Surgical search works

I’ve seen this pay huge dividends again and again: look at keywords as strategic opportunities. Get in the head of the searcher and frame your offering in their mind. Choose the keywords that present the greatest competitive advantage for you… find out what’s being searched on and how you can leverage that. Find those under served, less competitive terms and write ads that frame your proposition honestly and accurately.

Sure vague terms get a ton of traffic — that’s because many people are searching on them for reasons completely unrelated to your mission. Once you come to terms with that, making the top of your funnel much narrower becomes a no brainer.

Update on Monday, October 27, 2008 at 09:28AM by ion

Read my post from last week for more about ‘surgical’ PPC.

Comments

[Gary Ware]

Justin, Awesome post! This is even more important considering the economy that we live in today. We need to use our money wiser, to produce more targeted campaigns.

[ion]

Thanks Gary. That's exactly it. The surgical approach is more targeted, more specific and far less wasteful.

The other big takeaway is to move spend down in the funnel. When your spend is almost all pre click, then the top of your funnel is wide, but the bottom narrow. When you move spend wisely from pre click to post click, you widen the base of the funnel -- and that's the pipe to sales. That's not to say you allocate more overall, you just balance what you're already spending. I just wrote an article that details this and will blog about it when it runs.

Thanks again.

[Brian Carter]

Nice, very important concept, and love the graphic!

[ion]

Thanks Brian. We see a lot of clients move to a leaner funnel and enjoy huge leaps in ROI. Bronto Software shows the tremendous potential of narrowing the funnel combined with investment in post-click marketing. That combination multiplied Bronto's paid search ROI by 10x.