In today's economic environment, many financial SEM advertisers are faced with the challenging task of identifying new methods to fine tune their campaigns so that they're maximizing return on ad spend (ROI) in less than ideal conditions. With drastic changes in mortgage rates, to the tightening of credit, it's becoming more and more important that advertisers are proactively deploying new tactics to help weather the storm.
The recession has definitely brought about some pretty significant changes to the search space. It's no secret that the overall health of the consumer has been hindered in the past year - increasing unemployment, declining credit scores (along with other factors) have contributed to changes in the quality of search traffic. Many lending companies for instance may have experienced an increase in application volume as a result of higher demand for credit, but in many cases the actual approval volume has been impacted negatively due to the economic factors suppressing the consumer. Its reasons such as these that call for a higher level of targeting of keywords/campaigns, greater visibility into search trends, and fine tuning of campaigns to weed out unwanted traffic.
Here are a few tips to consider when thinking about new ways to maximize quality of traffic:
Keyword trends
As a result of the changing economic environment, search behavior has evolved significantly this past year. Many cash strapped consumers are desperately searching for credit after being previously declined or having their credit line reduced. This in turn has led to spikes in search volume for terms like 'financial help' and 'bad credit loans,' just to name a few. Even if you're not bidding on these types of keywords, there’s a good chance that queries of this nature are getting mapped to more generic (expensive) keywords in your account. This calls for a regular ongoing review of search query data to identify any possible negative match candidates that can be added to improve the quality of traffic. On the flip side, if the conversion rate on these queries is positive, you may want to consider adding them as exact match in a separate campaign or ad group to more easily control and monitor performance. You can pull search query data at the account/campaign/ad group level within the Google Adwords reporting center (or utilize the Efficient Frontier reports, for existing clients). Ideally, the query report should be at the conversion level to understand how each individual query performs prior to making any adjustments to your campaigns. I recommend evaluating the query level performance based on a revenue-per-click (RPC) metric to understand how the queries perform in relation to each other.
For advertisers in the real estate space, you should be on the lookout for spikes in 'foreclosure' and 'short sale' related queries, which can possibly trigger an ad for one of your more general 'for sale' broad match keywords. Usually foreclosure/short sales aren't as lucrative from a pricing perspective, but the rise in foreclosures/short sales can mean high volume (which in turn can offset the lower average sale price). Again, being on the lookout for such queries could possibly lend itself to more precise targeting of ads, and even new opportunities. It's also worth noting that Google is doing a beta test for select advertisers to remove the 'query buckets' (IE: "30 other queries") within their search query reports, so hopefully we can expect to see data at a more granular level in the near future.
Google Insights
I also recommend utilizing the Google Insights tool to get an idea of search traffic trends and 'rising searches' which may be contributing to spikes in traffic on your broad match keywords. It's helpful to run the tool weekly on a few of your top spending keywords to get an idea of any 'up and coming' queries that may be getting broad matched to your ads. In the example above, I ran the tool for the term 'mortgage' and the phrase 'obama mortgage plan' was returned under the 'rising searches' section, so as a general best practice, it's a good idea to run a search query report and scan through the list of queries to monitor any potential buzz worthy traffic that may be coming in. This traffic may or may not be good converting, so the option to either expand your negative set, or build out your broad/exact keyword list exists. With the volatility in the financial space and the policy changes coming out of Washington, ensuring your ads aren't getting taken for a ride is essential to maintaining some level of consistency among your campaigns.
DOW (Day of Week) Trends
Another potential area of opportunity is budget allocation by DOW, according to ROI trends. The decision to shift more/less spend to specific days should be based on sufficient data (usually at least 3-6 months) and is usually best evaluated by comparing RPC across the various days. If after analyzing your data you find specific days that convert significantly better than others (20%+ variance), it may make sense to shift spend from the lower performing days to the days that perform better. This is a particularly good strategy because it doesn't necessarily require additional ad-spend; it's really about shifting spend in the most efficient manner to maximize overall return.
~ by Sean LeBlanc
Comments