Click Per Pay - Building Keywords Backwards
One of the most memorable moments for me at the Blog World Expo wasn’t the partying, or the booth babes or even the free alcohol, but it was when Darin Carter, Danielle, Greg Morgan and I sat down at a table and watched Darin give us a crash course in high level pay per click management.
So not to divulge all his secrets, I will just highlight one important lesson that’ll make you smack your forehead and say . . . “ahh dammit, i should have thought of that!” because that’s exactly what I did when I heard it!
First, open your Google Analytics for your website and go to your Traffic Sources overview. If you don’t have analytics installed, I don’t know what to do with you (that’s a hint to go install it NOW). Next, click on “Keywords” and a list of keywords will show up of search phrases people have been using to get to your site. Now export that list into excel by either copy and pasting or typing it out. Google sucks for not having an export feature, but at least they give you this.
Next, you’ll want to head over to wordtracker.com and buy a 1 week subscription for $30 USD or if you’re really short on cash, they have a free trial that gives you a limited search result. Wordtracker is a site that has tools that can help you generate thousands of relevant keywords based on ones you already have and is used by a lot of people in the industry.
Once you have this list of keywords, you can throw them back into your PPC campaigns and start bidding on them to see which ones start converting for you or which ones generate traffic for you to build a landing page for.
See how easy that was? How’s your forehead feeling?
Bookmark at:StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
Thanks for the little tip. I’ll give it a try. Sounds like you all had a blast at BlogworldExpo… I’m planning on being there next year - see you then
i’ve been using this technique for gm and i have to add…if you’re running an e-commerce, make sure to activate the e-commerce sales tracking in analytics. not only will you find which natural keyword searches are getting clicks, but you’ll know exactly which ones are converting, and which ones reap the largest sales. analytics rocks
Good tip. I regularly check my web tracker logs for fresh keywords. Your logs are some of the best sources of good keywords because there you can see exactly what people are typing into the search engines. You can get a nice glimpse into your customers’ mind by analyzing your logs - what problems they need a solution for, etc.
WOW … I’m honored that you picked up on that … wait till I give you the next batch of PPC tips … there’s stuff I haven’t even hit you guys with !!! … but that will be at our next meeting in person!
Darin
Well, you could save yourself a LOT of time and a LOT of money by simply setting up goal tracking and only exporting the terms that you KNOW convert.
I’m off to write a post on that now actually….
ahh . . taking it a step further . . . thanks dave . . . can’t wait to read your post
Here you go:
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/using-analytics-for-building-keyword-lists/
Thanks for causing me to waste an hour of my Thursday evening ;P