Why I Hate “Your Competitors Top Performing Keywords”
Some people think I’m a little too concerned with dictionary definitions because I point at claims like “Find your competitors top performing keywords,” and laugh then curse. Ok, you don’t have access to my competitors paid ad accounts – tell me, Mister Ad Guru, just how do you define “top performing?” How can you make a determination, from outside the account, which keywords actually perform best for anyone other than yourself without violating a non-disclosure agreement or something?
Who decides what constitutes performance?
In all my years of PPC (yes, I’m part of the original GoTo.com generation), I have almost never worked with a retailer who knew themselves which of their keywords were their top performers. Why? Because no one ever bothered to define what constituted “performance” at the keyword level.
Where’s The Performer?
There is an inherent problem in defining performance for keywords. Yahoo attempts to address this by giving you “assists” in their PPC keyword stats. Google Analytics allows you to assign a goal to the first keyword in a string of search-generated traffic from a single visitor rather than to the last word. Why do they do this? It has to do with the fact that unless you have the right analytics in place, you can’t tell which or how many keywords it took to make a sale. If all you look at is the PPC account reporting, you just see the last word in the string… this might be the word that “got” the sale but it’s not the word that started the ball rolling.
Let me explain – I worked with a client who sold women’s eye makeup. Their brand isn’t a household name, and they aren’t particularly widespread. But one day the VP looked at a keyword “conversion” report generated by Google and saw that a good proportion of their recorded conversions came on their brand name. Despite advice to the contrary, he went into his account and promptly paused nearly ALL of his more general search terms, terms like “waterproof mascara,” and “black eyeliner.” He left all his brand and product names as remaining keywords because that’s where he saw the most conversion activity. His brand name, like most brand names, had a much lower CPC so he could be in the top positions for less money. If he kept his bid down a little, into position 4, he could save even more because he should be organically ranked very highly under his brand name. A no-brainer, right?
Ouch
He lost 25-30% of his total conversions every month for three months straight before he let someone fix his keyword list. This was actual conversion loss – not a drop in conversion rate. He lost over 60% of his total PPC-generated sales in three months. Why? Because he paused all the keywords with which shoppers began the shopping process online. Waterproof mascara. Black eyeliner. Electric lash curler.
Shoppers didn’t know his brand – they knew they wanted waterproof mascara. They didn’t search on the brand name until they’d found it by searching on the type of product.
Wouldn’t You Like To Be A Performer Too?
Certain 3rd party PPC management platforms highly tout their ability to string together all the keywords used by the same “visitor” which contributed to a sale. But then you have study your analytics and visitor behavior to figure out which, if any of them, can perform on their own. Do you really need all those words in order to get the final sale? Sometimes your best bet is to “be the shopper.” Don’t you shop online? What happens when you sit down at a computer to look for a gift or to replace a broken part or to find out where the next family vacation will be? Do you buy from the first site you go to? Do you buy the first time you go there? Most people don’t.
So you have a SpyFu account and a list of your competitors’ keywords. So what? You know what they advertise for, but you can’t tell what those words actually do for them in the long run. If you don’t review their ads, you don’t know how they’re trying to drive traffic. Even if you check their ads, you have no way to know if they’re successful. {editor’s note: after this post, we were invited to beta-test a tool that attempts to qualify ad profitability – stay tuned} If you don’t visit and dig around in their websites, you don’t know what sort of job they do making the sale. And most of all, if you don’t look at all this data from the perspective of trying to do this right, do this better than your competition, you will end up being in the same boat, bidding on the same words, using the same ads, maybe even using the same conversion elements on your landing pages. There’s already too much of “the same” out there. Use your competitive intelligence and your insights into your market, and hopefully your understanding of your customers, and make yourself the Top Performer.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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