super keywords

article - what do you think?

[eWhisper]

A ClickZ article [clickz.com] about marketing for 'super keywords', what many call generic terms. It's written for SEM, but think it's just as applicable to PPC.

If you did straight KW ROI, many of these terms would fail the test as people won't initially buy from these terms.

How many people track the initial KW used to find a website, and then buy on a visit down the road from another ad? If you used the conversion tools, the later KW would get the credit, when the generic one was used to start the interaction between you and the buyer.

I think sometimes people get too caught up in the exact term that made sales, and forget that sometimes it might be a cooperative effort between many KWs.

[fabfurs]

Agreed eWhisper

While I can't track the origninal hit, I know that it exist by trial and error. It has become a part of my overal ROI calculation of all online advert $$$.

[hannamyluv]

We advertise on a few "super keywords" and actually make a profit off them. The key is to make sure that your ad is super explicit as to what you sell and to not sucumb to having to be #1 (2, 3 or 4 for that matter) We make a healthy profit off them even when we are as far down the page as 7 or 8.

I don't make as much per customer as I would like on "super keywords" but as longa as they are profitable, I figure it's a great way to gain new customers.

[tedster]

This reminds me of a campaign I was involved in a year ago. The purpose was email opt-in, not immediate sales, and we used only "super keywords".

After six months, the campaign finished that phase and we stopped the ads. Then (and only then) I began to see something in the logs: hits to the ad's clickthrough page using the full page title - and that was a very unusual set of words.

So clearly we had a residual amoount of return traffic who remembered the title, no longer could find the ad, and were coming in and signing up after the ad campaign was over.

The ROI for the "super words" campaign did not reflect those sign-ups, but it probably should have -- a point this article makes quite nicely.

[hannamyluv]

This quarter, we have started tracking a 14 day return on our PPC ads. I will be very interested to see if the super keywords perform better with the 14 day tracking. It will take my PPC campaigns to a new level if it works out as I think and the article implies.

[eWhisper]

I've not tracked G this way, as some of the 'super kws', have a hardtime maintaining minimum CTR rates, and when you add 300 negative kws, it's hard to think of it as really a 'super kw' any longer. Although, we did track it on OV for quite some time, and because the bidding is often lower on generic terms, our ROI was actually higher for 'widget' than for 'blue widget', although the 3 term titles (i.e. fuzzy blue widget) blew them all away as far as ROI went, just small sales figures.

[shorebreak]

IMO Kevin Lee was doing his usual article style, which is to say write an article that makes it seem too hard for a marketer to do large-scale SEM inhouse; lo and behold Kevin's firm offers SEM consulting services.

One thing you'll *never* see is Kevin writing an article about how it makes sense for many, many large advertisers to manage SEM inhouse.