Today I did an analysis of the top qualifiers for three of my accounts. We’re doing some PPC keyword research and I wanted to make sure we made the most of our time so the goal was to identify themes of top converting keywords. Instead of looking into specific product keywords I wanted to look at which PPC keyword qualifiers create the most value for my clients. This blog post is the result of that analysis, a comparison of all three accounts to show you which  seem to perform best, and some tips on how to do a similar analysis on your own! When talking about PPC keyword qualifiers I am referring to words or phrases that we wrap around the keywords we bid on. These are words like, “buy,” “online,” and “cheap”. PPC account managers use them to try to find and drive the most qualified searchers to their site in order to increase sales. The accounts I looked at were PPC accounts across three different verticals. For each account an SQR was run for all of July. The primary metric used was sales volume as a percentage of total sales instead of a CPL goal because the interest here was which drove volume of sales versus sales at a CPA or ROAS goal. It’s also because the goals are so different across the accounts that it made it hard to compare them against each other. And the top PPC keyword qualifiers were… The percent of conversions that was used was based only on the percent of conversions that use these qualifiers. I did a quick scan of my search query reports, and did not see any other qualifiers that I missed, so it is a good representation of conversions created by keywords with qualifiers. It amounted to about 20% of total conversions with the bulk of conversions coming off head terms with no qualifiers, and branded terms. You can see, that “best” is by far my best qualifier. This is followed by “online” and “buy”. Of course, that if you only look across all the accounts. For account A “Cheap” was actually the top performer. It’s obvious that there isn’t always any real value to an aggregate of data in the PPC world, I recommend running a similar report for your own account(s) and see if there are any qualifiers that make a major impact for you. If there are, you have some nifty feedback on where to direct your keyword research. Potentially, you could even go back to your current keyword list and insure that you have that top qualifier or those top qualifiers for each of your relevant keywords. If you’re interested in running your own analysis, here’s how:

1. Run an SQR
2. Add a tab to the report
3. List out your top 10 or so qualifiers
4. In a column to the right, do a “=sumif() formula and sum the Search Term Column if the column contains”*Qualifier*” replacing qualifier with the qualifier you are summing, and then sum the Conv. Column.
5. Sum the conversion column.
6. Now in a third column calculate the percentage of sales that came from that specific qualifier by dividing the qualifiers sales by the totals sales.

Once you do an analysis in this way, you can also switch it up a but to add columns for impressions, clicks and cost. That way you can look at total effectiveness, what percent of budget is being spent across your different qualifiers, and truly identify good keyword themes to explore. Jeff  Allen is an Account Director at Hanapin Marketing, a search engine marketing firm focused on generating results through pay-per-click advertising. Learn more about Hanapin Marketing's PPC management services. Related posts:

1. How To Increase Your Online and In-Store Holiday Sales With Coupon Codes, Sales and Promos
2. Use these 5 Tips to Increase Last Minute Traffic, Conversions & Sales!
3. Increase Your PPC Ecommerce Sales with Yahoo! And Pricegrabber
4. Geo-Qualifiers In Your Keywords and Ads Can Give Your Local PPC A Boost!
5. How To Set Up Your Own SBS Keyword Analysis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.