Paid Search Coverage: Why it is Important
As consumers continue to flock to the search engines to research their pending buying decisions and make purchases, it is more important than ever to make sure that your company is doing everything it can to maximize online exposure and get in front of Web browsers. Paid search coverage is the term used to describe the percent of time your text ad serves an impression on the first search engine results page (SERP), which is a vital part of achieving your search goals. For example, if the keyword “Chicago Marketing Firm” is searched 100 times on Google and your ad appears on the first page of the SERP 60 times, your coverage is 60%.
The reason coverage is important is simply because you want to be in the consumer’s consideration set each and every time a potential buyer queries a high performing keyword within your account. If your ad isn’t there, it cannot be clicked, and therefore you lose that potential sale or lead to a competitor. Given this reality, if you know which keywords will perform best for your company, you should make sure you receive as much coverage as possible in order to yield maximum results. This is an important point to note as many retailers often constraint the earning potential of high performing keywords because they leave them in campaigns, amongst many other keywords, that have tight daily budget limitations; effectively decreasing their opportunity to earn additional revenue. Important reminder: Daily budgets are set at the campaign level in the major search engines.
As an example, let’s say you sell widgets. You are only bidding on three keywords; “red widget”, “white widget”, and “blue widget”. Your average cost-per-click (CPC) is $1.00 for each keyword and you have a daily budget limitation on your widgets campaign (in which your three keywords reside) of $99. For the sake of the example, your clicks have been distributed evenly at 33 clicks per day per keyword. Based on historical metrics your return on advertising spend for “red widget” is $2 for every $1 spent, for “white widget” is $3 for every $1 spent, and for “blue widget” it is $4 for every $1 spent. Obviously “blue widget” is your best performing word given the aforementioned metrics.
Based on high market demand for blue widgets, you could easily get 100 clicks per day for the keyword “blue widget”, but due to poor coverage management you are not giving yourself the opportunity to get in front of all the qualified buyers as your current campaign setup only allows for 33 clicks per day. The solution to this problem is to move the keyword “blue widget” into its own campaign, with its own increased daily budget limitation so you can gain adequate coverage for your best performing keyword, impacting the bottom line. This simplified example only utilized a three keyword paid search account to make its point. Now imagine you are running a campaign with thousands of keywords that has one-hundred or more high performers. When dealing with that type of volume using third-party coverage reporting becomes a resource that one should consider. See the sample report for a DVD burner retailer below:
There are different tactics to achieving 100% coverage on your PPC terms and many of the methods are the same that Google deems important in regard of your overall ad quality score. As you may recall from our previous blog, quality score is a ranking that the engines use to assign to keywords you have bidded on to indicate your site’s level of quality and relevance to the query. The higher your quality score, the higher the position your ads receive within the search results. Some ways to optimize for quality score, and by default also increase your coverage, are:
-Make sure the keyword queried shows up not only in your ad title, but also in line one or two of the copy, as well as in the display URL. This tells both the user and the search engine that you are relevant to the query.
-Have a specific landing page relevant to the user’s query that has the keyword within the body text and preferably in the title tag as well. The page should also upload in a timely manner as long load times adversely affect quality score and potentially coverage.
-Bid competitively. Now, we’re not saying you need to be the highest bidder, but as long as you’re in the top four or five spots for your high performing keywords, you should be fine.
As you execute these tactics, improving quality score in the process, your potential for achieving 100% coverage dramatically increases.
There are a few competitive search tools that track your coverage automatically, so you don’t have to spend all day performing manual searches. AdGooroo and The Search Monitor are two good resources. Using one of these tools should aid in the overall process of obtaining 100% coverage on all your branded terms.
More From RiseInteractive
- Why are web analytics so important to Internet marketing?
- Quality Score – The Key to Ranking First in Paid Search
- Paid Search: Why You Should Bid on Branded Keywords
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