Keyword research is crucial to online marketing success, because keywords still govern the way people find information online. Keywords help us accurately find the information that we are looking for among the flood of information on the Web.
As such, proper keyword research with quality keyword research software allows you to understand what set of keywords consumers are using to find what they need. It also allows you to select proper keywords for an SEO campaign based off key metrics such as search volume, competition, and seasonal demand.
But with all the research tools available out there, which one should you use?
Here’s a hint: Marketers are vying for a prime spot on Google. Doesn’t it make sense to use a keyword tool owned by Google?
Google’s own Google Ads Keyword Tool is one of the best keyword research tools available. This is largely due to the fact that most other keyword research tools pull data directly from Google’s tool via API. While 3rd party tools often do a better job of displaying Google’s data and combining that data with other data to present proprietary or unique insights, they are broken as often as Google changes its keyword tool (which, lately, has been daily).
Since most 3rd party tools draw on data from Google’s keyword tool, my experience with them has been one of unreliability. Furthermore, the proprietary data insights that are often provided by 3rd party keyword research tools are often misleading, inaccurate, or downright useless.
Add in the fact that Google’s keyword tool is free, and you have a compelling case. Let’s take a close look at this awesome keyword research tool.
In recent years, Google Adwords Keyword Tool’s interface has gone through several transformations, but the latest has resulted in a cleaner and simpler-to-use interface.
On the main interface is the word or phrase box, where you type the keywords you’re researching. Right below it are Website and Category.
Right below the main box on the interface is the Advanced Options and Filters feature, which lets you more specifically target your research to certain countries, languages, and devices from which traffic is coming.
On the left are several features that let you customize your research further by selecting the match types of the keywords you’re looking for, whether broad or exact.
For the sake of illustration, I’ll walk you through the steps on how to do research for keywords based on Exact Match, which I recommend using for SEO campaigns.
Let’s say you’re gunning for “LinkedIn Marketing”.
1. Type “LinkedIn Marketing” on the Word or phrase box.
2. You can leave out category for the keywords we’re using here, but for accuracy, I recommend you choose the most appropriate category for the keywords you’re researching.
3. Click on the Advanced Options and Filters feature.
4. On the left hand side of the page you’ll see Match Types
Now it’s time to move on to the next phase of the research – gleaning information from the results.
The Keyword Ideas section shows the main keywords, i.e. “LinkedIn Marketing” and the list of variations for the keywords, the Competition and the numbers for Local and Global Monthly Searches.
The list of Keywords column shows results for the main keywords and its variations. In the case of Exact Match, the column shows the exact set of words or phrases consumers use to learn about “LinkedIn Marketing”.
The Competition column shows how competition looks whether it’s Low, Medium or High. Aim for keywords with Low competition. Keywords with low competition will have a better chance of hitting the first page of Google’s search results.
But don’t discount keywords with Medium to High competition; you can target them for your long-term campaigns.
The Local Monthly Searches column shows the average number of searches for the keywords in a specific country or region in a typical month. Global Monthly Searches, on the other hand, shows the average number of people worldwide looking for information on “LinkedIn Marketing”.
For easy reference, you can download the results in spreadsheet format by hitting the Download button right above the Keyword Ideas section.
Combine insights from Google’s Keyword Tool with data from an SEO competition comparison tool such as my personal favorite, Market Samurai (that’s an affiliate link – thank you for clicking, if you do!). If you or your clients’ website metrics stack up to the competition, then go for it.
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is an excellent keyword research tool. While it doesn’t give you exact numbers (not that any tool can), it’ll provide you with a good idea of which keywords to use as well as which ones to avoid. It’s clean, simple, and reliable, and when combined with insights from an SEO competition analysis tool, it gets the job done efficiently and effectively.
To find out more about keyword research and how to select the right keywords for your business’ PPC or SEO campaign, contact us!
The software as a service (SaaS) field has been growing consistently for more than a decade. By the end of 2023, it’s projected to be a $195.21 billion industry.
Every year, we see a rollout of hundreds of new SaaS businesses (and innovative tools they offer). Many of those tools grow at insane rates, attracting thousands (or even millions) of users in their first few months of operation.
How do they do it?
Obviously, most SaaS companies use a combination of marketing, advertising, and sales strategies to see those kinds of results. But one of the most promising channels is pay per click (PPC) advertising, primarily via Google Ads.
How do you optimize SaaS PPC campaigns effectively? Identifying and understanding your target audience is crucial. Without proper targeting and strategic planning, many SaaS PPC campaigns fail, leading to wasted resources. By leveraging well-crafted paid ads, SaaS businesses can connect with users who are actively searching for solutions, driving conversions and achieving substantial growth.
Before we can begin optimizing a PPC campaign for a SaaS business, we need to know what “optimization” truly entails.
Optimizing a PPC campaign simply means making it more effective, but how do we do that?
We’ll cover some of the specific tactics that can help us achieve this goal in the sections that follow, but ultimately, we are working in service of the following goals:
Target more valuable people. First, we want our advertising campaign to target more valuable people. If you target the most general possible audience, you could conceivably reach 8 billion people, but the vast majority of those people won’t be interested in using your products. It’s typically much more effective to target a smaller number of people, if those people are perfectly suited to your product. Reducing our focus on poor targets and increasing our focus on good targets should improve our overall results tremendously.
Before we get too deep into PPC optimization tactics, we need to establish a baseline.
Take a moment to consider:
Additionally, if you’ve practiced PPC advertising for this business already, gather up your existing data and perform an overall assessment. Have you been hitting your targets? In which areas does your campaign underperform or seem weak? Are there specific metrics that need to be improved?
One of the most reliable ways to improve your PPC ad campaign results in the SaaS industry is to better understand your target customers. With better market research and customer knowledge, you can target more appropriate keywords, improve your messaging strategy, and eventually make your efforts more cost efficient.
The higher your quality score is, the better. Without getting into the mechanics of this dynamic, higher quality scores are associated with higher ad rankings and lower costs.
One of the best ways to improve your quality score is to increase your clickthrough rate (CTR) for individual ads. Incidentally, these strategies tend to also be effective for making a better impression with new leads and prospects.
Start with these tactics:
Many new PPC advertisers make the mistake of thinking that optimization is a one-way street – a clear and specifically directed path to one destination. Once you get to that destination, you can run the perfect ad over and over again and continue to see great results.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
If you want your PPC ad campaign to remain relevant, you need to consistently create new ads and rotate them in. No matter how effective your previous advertising has been, it’s going to decline in effectiveness if you keep spamming the same people with it repetitively.
Cycling in new advertisements is a way to keep your ads looking fresh, a way to reach new types of people, and a way to effectively experiment and learn about potential new tactics. Never let your PPC ad campaign sit untouched for too long.
If you want to improve your targeting further, consider using both negative keywords and audience exclusions. Both of these features are designed to reduce the likelihood of targeting irrelevant people.
When it comes to negative keywords, include any keywords that might interfere with your goal. For example, if you’re trying to advertise your paid software, you might include the word “free” as a negative keyword. After all, people searching for a free solution to their problem probably aren’t going to be willing to pay for yours.
Audience exclusions are very similar, but it might take some finesse to figure out which types of audience members are best to exclude.
In any marketing or advertising environment, it’s important to be aware of your top competitors, so that you can effectively plan for them and differentiate yourself from them. On the simplest level, this can help you craft more unique, compelling advertisements that differentiate your brand from the other SaaS companies on your level.
You can also use this information to target people more strategically. For example, you can target people in a different phase of the sales funnel. It’s common for SaaS businesses to target people at the bottom of the funnel, since they’re much more likely to make a purchase. But if most of your competitors are targeting these demographics, your costs are going to increase. While it might mean targeting less immediately valuable customers, you can save a lot of money and make your advertising more effective by targeting people at the higher levels of the sales funnel.
Some of your most valuable prospects are going to be people who are already familiar with your brand and interested in your product. That’s why it usually pays to increase your remarketing budget, even at the expense of the rest of your PPC advertising campaign.
If you want to make your remarketing ads even more effective, segment your audience and use your ad copy to persuade them specifically. This is your chance to alleviate fears, address potential concerns, and speak to previous behavior you’ve seen from these users.
As you get more experience in remarketing, you’ll be able to increase your conversion rates steadily.
Finally, make a commitment to experiment, measure your results, and keep improving. There’s no surefire formula for the perfect PPC advertisement, and even if there was, it would quickly be rendered obsolete by changing audience attitudes, new market dynamics like emerging competitors, or new targeting or exclusion options available to you.
To be successful as a SaaS PPC advertiser, you need to keep moving constantly. The more you learn, and the more you optimize, the better results you’ll see.
Are you trying to scale up your SaaS business with the help of PPC advertising?
Do you need help optimizing or improving the effectiveness of your existing PPC ad campaign?
PPC.co can help. From conception to execution, and from experiments to solidified tactics, we’ll help you form and follow the best possible PPC path for your business.
No matter how long you’ve been running your PPC ads, you can always increase conversions just a little bit more. Sometimes that will involve tweaking your copy, your images, and the placement of page elements, and other times that will involve adjusting your target audience. When your goal is to increase your PPC conversions, you need to focus on landing page optimization and run a comprehensive landing page testing process.
To start getting better results, here are 8 PPC landing page tests you can run. Incorporating split testing into your strategy can help you compare different versions of your page to determine which one performs better. By testing landing pages systematically, you’ll identify changes that can drive significant improvements in your campaign’s overall performance.
Dynamic landing pages are essentially PPC landing pages that automatically change their content based on user input, like keywords, location, and more. This makes it easy to create a personalized experience for your visitors without having to create hundreds of PPC landing pages that perfectly match all possible combinations of your dynamic keywords.
When you start testing your PPC ad landing pages with dynamic landing pages, you’ll be able to tell which pages are converting better based on dynamic keywords being generated from your Google Ads. This will give you better insight into the efficacy of your ads and will help you learn more about your target market.
How many options do you give your visitors on your own landing pages? Do you have one product they can buy with a single click, or do your customers have to make a selection from a variety of options and variants?
At first glance, you might think giving your customers more options will generate more sales, but that’s not what the data says. In fact, if you’re not generating the sales you want, offering too many options could be what’s standing in the way. Landing page conversion rates often drop when too many choices are presented.
You’ve likely heard of “analysis paralysis” – the inability to make a decision when you’re presented with an overload of information. This occurs when someone is afraid of making the wrong decision and foregoing the ideal solution. When it comes to generating sales, giving prospects too many choices can result in analysis paralysis, and will actually cause more people to walk away than buy from you.
This phenomenon was demonstrated in 2000 in what has been dubbed “The Jam Experiment.” In this experiment, shoppers at Draeger’s Supermarket were given the opportunity to sample different flavors of Wilkin & Sons jams during two different sampling sessions hosted on different days. During the first session, shoppers were given 24 flavors to choose from, and during the second session, they were given just 6 flavors to choose from. The display with 24 flavors attracted more attention but resulted in one-tenth fewer sales. In other words, more people bought jam when they had fewer choices.
If this is what happened with something as simple as jam, imagine how an abundance of choices could be impacting your ability to sell important, high-ticket products and services.
Have you ever wondered why the fast-food chain In-N-Out Burger does so well without selling franchises or going public? Sure, they have amazing service and their food is good, but you can say that about a lot of businesses. From a marketing perspective, In-N-Out derives their success from having a simple menu consisting of burgers, fries, and drinks. However, unlike other burger joints you’ll only find three burgers on the menu: a hamburger, a cheeseburger, and a double cheeseburger.
While it’s true that a short menu tends to lower the spend per sales ticket, it increases the speed of service, which increases customer satisfaction and generates loyalty. After all, many people admit to driving for hours just to visit a newly opened In-N-Out Burger. Some have even waited in line for twelve hours to buy their food.
The lesson here is that people don’t want too many choices, and you’ll generate more sales by limiting the number of choices you offer to boost your lead generation efforts.
Your call-to-action (CTA) is more important than you might realize. Not only does your CTA entice people to click, but it can also influence whether or not visitors follow through with filling out your web forms.
For example, Culligan, a company that sells water filtration devices, experimented with their CTA by testing two variations. The first said “Get a Quote” and the second said “Get Pricing.” While both of these phrases mean the same thing, the results demonstrated the importance of matching visitor expectations. The page that used “Get a Quote” as the CTA saw 104% more form submissions. Why?
It’s because “Get a Quote” implies that the visitor will be asked to fill out a form with their information so they can talk to a service rep and get a personalized quote. “Get Pricing” implies that by clicking, the user will be taken to a page listing all the prices for various services. When asked to fill out a form, many users who expected immediate pricing ended up bouncing.
Check your CTA copy and really think about what you’re telling the user with your choice of words. There is a reason some CTAs convert better than others, and it’s not always because the copy is more persuasive – sometimes it’s because certain CTAs create a disconnect between the user’s expectations and reality. Make sure your CTAs create an accurate picture of what users can expect after they click.
What’s going on in the world that people are going to know about? Incorporate some current events into your PPC search ads to capture attention and see if you can get conversions. If you can come up with a clever search ad that is related to current events, like sports matches or upcoming national holidays, you’ll probably win some people over just by being clever.
Experiment with ads that play off of local events, local culture, holidays, and more. If you don’t have any ideas, consult with a professional PPC marketing agency because creating Google Ads like this is exactly what they do for their clients.
Your PPC landing pages should be extremely simple and users should intuitively know how to navigate, read, and understand what you want them to do next. If you have any page elements that get in the way of this process, you’ll want to eliminate them no matter what. For example, you could have the most beautiful slider at the top of your page that showcases brilliant photos of your products, but sliders have been shown to create resistance for visitors and they are a hindrance to conversions.
The problem with sliders is easy to see. The images change faster than visitors can take in the information they’re trying to read. Even if your slider doesn’t change that quickly, people are so used to nuisance sliders that they’ll just automatically start scrolling down the page when they see a slider.
Other page elements that can be difficult include pop-ups that open in a new window (these are largely forbidden by PPC platforms), pop-ups that aren’t easy to close, and videos without controls that prevent the user from pausing the video.
Check in with your landing pages to see if you have any elements that might be distracting or annoying to visitors and if anything looks like it might be in the way of getting conversions, make a new page and remove the element and test them both to see which page converts better.
Pop-ups are okay to use on landing pages with PPC ads as long as they are overlays and not new windows/tabs. Whether you already have pop-ups, or you’re just about to add some to your landing pages, make sure you spend a significant amount of time creating your campaigns.
Pop-ups are worth continually refining until they are pixel-perfect in terms of landing page design and size. You’ll also want to work on simplifying the copy. For example, avoid having paragraphs worth of text on a pop-up – most people won’t read that much copy. Use a short, powerful headline with a subheading, but limit the copy to a few lines.
Concerning the information, you ask for in your pop-ups, consider asking only for a first name and email address. If having a subscriber’s last name will help you in the future, then ask for a last name. However, if you’re only going to communicate with people online through email, a first name is all you need, and you’ll get more signups by asking only for a first name. However, some marketers have found that they get even better results by not asking for a name at all, and only asking for an email address. If a name is needed, they can use progressive profiling to get it later.
Which method is right for you? The only way to know is to run some experiments to test all of your options. However, if you’re not going to use progressive profiling, be sure to ask for at least a first name so you can get the higher open rates from sending out emails with personalized subject lines.
Many years ago, long form sales pages dominated the internet because everything was so new. Some speculate that long content made the business look more like an authority, especially when the content was full of good information. However, that was a time when people were primarily viewing websites from desktop computers. Today, most people are on mobile devices when viewing web pages, and long content is hard to read on mobile devices.
Sometimes long form sales pages are effective today, but not always. The only way to know how your content will perform in long vs. short forms is by testing it out yourself. However, remember that the key to generating conversions by shortening your content is to put your signup form or buy button front-and-center for your visitors. Go with a minimalist design to eliminate visual clutter and focus visitor attention on your signup form.
You can create landing pages that have a condensed version of your content on top with the extended version down below. Experiment with all of these options to see what works best for you.
If your product or service is used by people in different industries, then you need landing pages designed specifically to reach those individual markets. For example, you might run the same PPC ad for a variety of audiences, and that can work. However, you need individual, customized landing pages for each of your target audiences.
Elements to customize on each landing page include:
According to Unbounce, the highest converting landing pages have several key elements: compelling headings, a single and focused CTA, a clear value proposition, clear features and benefits, and testimonials or social proof. These elements should be present on all of your landing pages, but the content should change based on the target audience. You can also use a landing page builder to quickly create multiple pages for A/B testing purposes and multiple PPC landing page examples.
These are just a few ideas for what elements you can test to increase your PPC ad conversions in various search engines. As long as your conversion rates are below 100%, there is room for improvement. Never stop testing your Google Ads and landing pages; there’s always something you can adjust to squeeze out some more conversions.
Do you manage your PPC ads in Microsoft Excel? If so, you have an advantage. Excel is a powerful way to manage your ads, provided you know how to get the most out of your application. The more organized you are, the easier it is to accurately calculate your PPC ROI.
Managing Google PPC ads requires numerous and large calculations, all of which are easily handled by Excel. The process of learning advanced Excel tips can be time-consuming, but here are some ways to streamline your efforts and maximize ease of use.
However, you set up your Excel sheet to make calculations, it’s helpful to set your cell reference to display as currency rather than a plain text number. Sure, you can look at “8.00” and know it means “$8,” but it’s easier just to have that formula cell display the number in dollars. Using Excel tips like this ensures clarity in your Excel workbook.
Ideally, you’ll set your cells to display currency before you enter your data entry in the respective data tab. However, there will be times when you’ll need to change existing data into currency, and that’s where keyboard shortcuts come in handy.
You can use your mouse to navigate Excel’s menu and change cells to currency, but that’s a tedious process. It’s easier to use the ctrl+shift+4 shortcut. Just highlight the cell(s) you want to display in currency and then use this shortcut to quickly create custom number formats.
Another useful keyboard shortcut is one that turns the contents of cells into a percentage. This shortcut is ctrl+shift+5. This is useful when you want to look at certain numbers as a percentage rather than a whole number, but you don’t want those numbers displayed as a percentage permanently. This is especially helpful when applying data validation rules or trying to filter data efficiently in your Excel sheet. If you’re working on advanced formulas such as index and match functions, having properly formatted data is crucial for accurate results.
Sometimes you’ll need to calculate the sums of many individual rows or columns, and if you only have to do this once, it’s not a big deal to manually enter the Excel formulas. However, when you need to perform this type of calculation multiple times, it will become cumbersome.
You can automatically calculate the sum of a row or column by clicking in an empty cell and using the shortcut alt+the equal sign. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll need to use command+alt/option+the equal sign.
VLOOKUP is one of the most important, yet underused functions in Excel. This function allows you to reference data from other spreadsheets and incorporate that into your calculations. This means you don’t have to cram all of your data for every ad campaign (and corresponding ad copy) you run into one spreadsheet file just to be able to perform calculations.
Using this function does require setting the foundation, but once you set it up, your calculations between files will be smooth. To learn more about how this function works and to learn how to set it up, watch this tutorial video.
“Concatenate” means to combine or join together and is one of the best functions Excel provides for managing your PPC ads. With this function, you can combine the contents of multiple cells into one cell. You can also use it to add words or symbols to the end of multiple existing cells. For managing PPC ads, this function will speed up your work. Here are some examples.
When creating broad match modified keywords, you need to add a plus symbol to the beginning of your keyword. This isn’t easy to do manually, even when you use the copy and paste functions. The concatenate function makes this a breeze.
Just add the following function to an adjacent cell:
=CONCATENATE(“+”, B2)
For all cells below B2 (or whatever cell you’re starting with), use the fill handle to copy the formula to all the other cells.
When you’re building a list of keyword variations, you’ll benefit by using concatenate. For example, say your company sells socks for men, women, and kids. You’re going to come up with keyword variations that are the same for all three of these categories. To create your list quickly, start by typing your main keywords vertically in a column like this:
Mens
Womens
Childrens
Now, say you have the following variations: wool socks, cotton socks, hiking socks, work socks. You can use the concatenate function to add “wool socks” to each of your main categories, and then continue doing the same with the other types of socks you sell.
If you want to get even more advanced you can perform filter and search functions in Excel using pivot tables.
It won’t take long before your PPC ad data fills up your Excel spreadsheet and requires scrolling down the page. There’s nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that you will lose sight of your column headings. If you work with your spreadsheet regularly, you’ll probably have the headings memorized, but memory isn’t always reliable. You don’t want to look at your data one day and mistake your CTR column for your conversion rate. Additionally, if you ever need someone else to work with your data, they could get frustrated.
The solution is to freeze the rows at the top of your sheets. When a row is frozen, it will remain at the top of the sheet as you scroll down, so you’ll always have a proper reference for what you’re looking at no matter how far down you scroll.
To freeze multiple rows, highlight the row directly below the last row you want frozen. Then go to the “View” option in the main menu and select “Freeze Panes.” Choose the option “freeze pane” and every row above the one you selected will be frozen.
To freeze only your top row, you can just go to the “View” option in the main menu, select “Freeze Panes,” and choose the option “freeze top row.” Alternatively, you can use the shortcut alt+W+F+R to freeze the top row.
If you want to freeze the first column, go to the “View” option in the main menu, select “Freeze Panes,” and choose the option “freeze top column.”
When you need to count the characters in your longtail keywords, Len comes in handy. For instance, when you have exact matches longer than three words you can program it to add that to your modified broad match keywords. Len is best used in conjunction with concatenate to fill in the modifiers.
Sometimes you’ll need to apply formulas to additional cells, but doing this manually takes a long time. The trick here is to place the formula in your first cell so that it performs the first calculation, and then hover your mouse over the cell. You’ll see a plus sign appear in the bottom right corner, and when you double click on that plus sign, it will automatically calculate the remainder of cells.
Find and replace is one of the oldest life-saving functions around. It helps if you’ve accidentally clichéd and pasted something incorrectly, but it also helps you change words when you just need to make a change.
When you only have a couple of instances of a word, it’s not a big deal to change them manually. However, when you have ten or more, including hundreds or even thousands of instances, using the find and replace function will make your life easier. For instance, you might decide you want to turn all of your broad match keywords into a modified broad keyword. Use find and replace to add that plus sign in front of each instance of your keywords.
When you’re managing mass amounts of PPC data, you need a tool that will perform automatic calculations and make it easy for you to play with your data to crunch numbers in different ways. Excel is an excellent tool for the job, provided you take advantage of some of these PPC Excel tips, shortcuts and functions.
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