Underperforming Keywords and housecleaning...

how deep do you go?

[Shak]

How deep do you go when looking at keywords or phrases, and do you look at ROI for "each" specific word or leave it to general product sectors/pages?

The reason I ask is that the deeper you get, the better your ROI is.

Was doing some tidying up in campaigns this week, and noticed 1 product which was getting slightly less than the average conversion, went in a bit deeper and realised that just 1 keyword was the problem, lots of traffic but terrible ROI, removed the keyword and am seeing 200% increase in that sector.

morale of the story, do NOT be happy with your lot, and keep looking...

Shak

[Michael Anthony]

How do u look at ROI for each specific word without having a separate URL for each? Unless u read the whole server log to track each referred visit by search term?

My own (limited) experience is that some words may only get 2 or 3 clicks per month, but may still produce results. In my case, it's that old favourite about advertising that applies "I know that half of my advertising spend is wasted, I just don't know which half"

[shorebreak]

Michael, you raise an interesting dilemma - going broad with large, large numbers of keywords will get you the best, highest converting traffic, but monitoring and managing those keywords is beyond the capacities of most companies.

There are firms, though (mine included) that have developed software to help companies with thousands to hundreds of thousands of keywords manage their keyword portfolio in a time and cost-effective manner.

[dougs]

Great point Shak.

We have a substantial ppc campiagn on one site and removed 20 of our 22000 listings. Our cost dropped to 20% of the previous months, our sales dropped to 95% of the previous months.......we liked that a great deal:)

Dougs

[Sarah Britton]

We also have over 2000 search terms listed.
When introducing a bulk list of key words I am unable to keep a tab on the performance of all of them simultaneously- I beleive in selecting a few search terms and then monitoring them closely for a fortnight- this gives me an idea as to the ROI I can expect from each term.

[androidtech]

To those making queries about individual keyword ROI.

That's why I always test market on FindWhat first. They will give you a breakdown of your costs by keyword.

What really is cool is their AdAnalyzer code. Just drop it (an HTML snippet) on the page that you call your "conversion" or "sales" page, like a "Thank You" page after a visitor places an order. It sends a message to the FindWhat servers, and they can trace back to find the keyword that was responsible for the visitor coming to your site. When you run your Keyword Cost report, you will see a conversion percentage for each keyword, and the average cost and total cost for that keyword.

You can even attach a revenue amount so you can get an ROI figure by keyword.

Even if I have a primary campaign on AdWords or something, I almost always run a parallel campaign on FindWhat, to get these figures.

Disclaimer: I'm just a customer, not an affiliate of FindWhat.

thx