PPC Tip Of The Week: Analyse Your Keywords Before Removing Them

This tip is more for e-commerce site owners rather than affiliates, but it's one that I'm sure many would find interesting.

If you've got a whole load of keywords in AdWords and you've also use Analytics there's some nifty keyword refinement you can do by exporting your list of keywords.

In Analytics go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google > Paid (just above the list). The export the data to csv then you'll get a whole host of information about how long people stayed on your site, how many pages they visited, what the bounce rate was, and your goal conversion rates.

With many keywords the first thing you'd want to do is remove your most irrelevant keywords straight away. With most sites there's a funnel that visitors have to go down to transact or conduct a lead. So ...

Sort the "Bounce Rate column" in descending order. Any keywords that have a value of 1 review to see if you have enough data to allow you to draw a reasonable conclusion, if you have mark them for a negative match. Others will just stand out with only just one visit - so do the same to them.

A tip to the tip: Use Excel's Auto filtering so you can show only keywords that have had more than 20 visitors that period, for example, and has a bounce rate of 80% or greater - but choose your own numbers.

You can also organise by the average time the user spends on your site (in seconds). Again select a minimum here and negative match or remove keywords that don't have the required associated length of time on the site.

From this you can also see if there are some keywords that make people stay on the site for a long time, but don't actually convert. This may indicate that they feel the site is relevant, but just can't find the relevant information or product. From this you could assume that your keyword isn't relevant, you're using the wrong landing page, there's some extra information that the user requires before making a purchase (i.e. postage info) but can't find and then abandons because of it.

This can also be assumed by looking at the Pages/Visit information. Your site may have a lot of information per page so the number of pages viewed may be more relevant than the time spent - it's your call. But make sure you do analyse this data.

It's also important to compare the length of time and average page visit numbers between paid and non-paid search sources. This may allow you to compare your SEO and SEM campaign effectiveness.

The reason that I go into this much detail is that some keywords may have such a low volume of traffic that its dangerous to look at a week's data and assume you can make an accurate conclusion about removing keywords.

If there is little data, being able to see how close those users got to transacting should give you an indication if that keyword is likely to convert in the future.

So my PPC tip of the week is: Analyse keywords thoroughly before removing them or reducing bids.