The Importance of Studying Your Search Terms in PPC Campaigns
Search queries lie at the heart of every PPC campaign. After all, your customer’s searches are what literally drive each of your campaigns. Yet, despite their obvious importance, many businesses fail to regularly monitor and learn from their customer’s search terms.
Your PPC campaign’s search terms are a valuable window into your customer’s needs and preferences. At Affirma, we try to take a look at search terms every two weeks for each of our campaigns. Each time we delve into it, we come away with different insights into how our campaigns are doing, but more importantly, how our customers are searching for our services.
I’ll show three major benefits that studying search terms can bring to your campaign. From helping to refine and craft keywords, to helping you formulate the right negative keywords, search terms should become an integral step in your campaign monitoring.
Refining Your Keywords
First, understanding your campaign’s search terms will give you greater insight into how to craft and refine your keywords. We know that every PPC campaign is reliant upon keywords to trigger relevant traffic to corresponding ads. But sometimes we make keyword lists without full visibility into our customer’s preferences or decision-making. Sometimes we make campaigns built off projected traffic. But search traffic only tells part of the story. It is important to know whether the directed traffic is relevant or not.
Looking at the search terms will help you with this. If you’re targeting the keywords for eyeglasses, but your search terms include many people looking for whisky glasses you know that you have a problem attaining relevant traffic.
Finding Negative Keywords
This brings us to the second benefit that search terms can bring. Formulating the right negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that if triggered, ensure your ads will not run. The best method of finding the right negative keywords for your campaigns is looking through your search terms and targeting irrelevant search queries. If whisky glasses are jolting your eyeglass campaigns, seeing your search terms will help you craft the right negative keywords to keep your campaigns on track.
Addressing Customer Needs
Finally, going through your search terms will help you adjust your ads and landing pages to better reflect your customer’s desires. It is absolutely critical that your landing pages and ads cater to your customer’s searches. If your landing page caters towards eyeglasses, but your customer’s search terms contain lots of searches for sunglasses, you can modify your landing pages and ads to better reflect those desires.
All PPC campaigns require constant monitoring and tinkering. As customer needs and preferences change, so will your ads, landing pages, and keywords. But for your to get insight into your customer’s needs, you’ll first need to find what they’re looking for through their search terms.
If your PPC campaigns feel too out of hand, Affirma can take the reins. Our digital marketing teams are experienced with managing PPC campaigns of all sizes and budgets. We’d be happy to help you run yours. If you’d like for us to help, let us know and a member of our team will reach out to provide a free, initial consultation.
