Search Term Popularity Mistakes
When it comes to choosing search terms, concentrate on quality over quantity. It is the quality of the traffic that matters, not the quantity or number of times it drives traffic to your site.
In the world of marketing and web analytics, quality means the likelihood of a prospect becoming a customer. Whether it’s a trial download, sale or lead generation, we want to know what makes customers likely to buy so that we can work to encourage that behavior and replicate it elsewhere.
Judging Popularity Is Straightforward
Popular search terms are no exception to the rule and are easy to spot when performing site analysis. It helps to distinguish the relative popularity of the same term across different search engines and directories. From this we can begin to understand how various search engine users behave differently.
How To Determine a Quality Search Term
Instinctively, the first place we look for quality is in the amount of revenue generated by each keyword. However, this metric is a blunt instrument with a too-hard line that delineates success from failure. Two factors reduce its usefulness in determining the visitor’s likelihood to buy: cookie deletion and latent conversions.
Setting a cookie is an absolute must for tracking ROI, but they’re only useful while they live on the client’s machine. If the user deletes the cookie, the conversion data become invisible. First-party cookies are the way to go, as they aren’t usually blocked by anti-virus or anti-spyware software.
Latency or latent conversions occur when a user comes into your site via search, receives a cookie, looks around for a while, leaves and then returns sometime in the future making a purchase. While the keyword eventually gets the credit for triggering a sale, you’re without that data for 30 or 60 days or more, depending on your sales cycle. In essence, you’re spending valuable PPC dollars while you wait for ROI.
Average Time on Site
One of the most reliable, insightful metrics is Average Time on Site (ATOS). This metric speaks to the fact that web users just don’t waste their time on a site that doesn’t interest them. There are hundreds–even thousands of other sites just a click away in the search results if the one they click on doesn’t meet their needs. Please note that ATOS is not meaningful in absolute terms or across different sites—only use this metric within the same site for different search terms or segments.
ATOS helps solve ROI problems because it’s not cookie-dependent, and there is no latency; you have data within hours of a campaign
going live. ATOS closely correlates to the probability of prospects becoming customers, which is extremely helpful in making smart marketing decisions.
When Average Time on Site Shows Short Visits
When you find search terms that have a Short Average Time on Site compared to others, your first reaction might be to eliminate that keyword from your PPC campaigns. But before deleting the keyword and the campaign, make sure that you’re meeting the needs of the visitors. Does the landing page correlate to the search term they used? If not, make tweaks to the landing page instead of the campaign, then retest.
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