Hankering after those keywords you can't afford but know will draw in the masses? Try testing and improving your landing page. It is not the cost per click that matters, but the cost per acquisition.
"The beauty of keywords is, you can quickly see what's working," says Michael Grover, Director of Marketing for CMP Media TechWeb. By testing landing pages, he says, you can make your offer more compelling and get more visitors buying. When more visitors buy, even expensive words become affordable.
Grover suggests you keep the following in mind:
Track the effectiveness of your keywords and focus your landing page tests on the words that are getting the most clicks. "An enormous number of terms that people would like to buy don't actually get any hits," Grover explains.
When "on demand computing" was particularly hot in the tech field, for example, several advertisers wanted to buy the phrase, but nobody was searching for those words, he says.
Non product-specific keywords can be tricky. If someone clicks on the phrase "Panasonic 42-inch plasma screen TV," they should really see a specific landing page for that TV family, Grover says, rather than a general page listing every TV a company sells.
But that kind of specificity might not be realistic if you have hundreds of keywords. While your most important keywords may indeed warrant separate landing pages, you should also test ways to group less important keywords together. Does it make more sense to have a landing page just for plasma screen TVs, or to have a page with plasma and flat-screen TVs?
The landing page should be primarily about what you're selling. But many companies use their standard Web page template, with the same navigation bar and other elements that distract visitors who potentially have a specific purchase in mind.
Test landing pages that have fewer links so you don't "diffuse the message so much that they move on to something else," Grover says.
If that's not possible, test the option of putting necessary links below the fold.
Advertisers love Flash. Consumers hate it. When using keywords, consumers are taking action, creating momentum, and moving forward. Think of Flash as a brick wall. According to Grover, marketers need to avoid anything that slows down the sales process.
If you don't believe us, at least take the time to test your Flash landing page against the same page without Flash.
"The landing pages that work best are the ones that deal with exactly what the person is searching for," Grover says. If someone searches for widgets, that's what they want to find. "You don't want to show them your support page or home page or another product. You want to show them widgets."
"The most critical investment a company can make is a way to know what's happening on its landing pages," says Grover. Look at which ad a visitor clicked from and where they went within your site -- in other words, follow the "advertising clickstream" (a subset of Web analytics as a whole).
Then, you want to figure out why people are behaving the way they are, "and that's where testing and trial and error comes in," Grover says.
When it comes to testing colors, blue trumps red, he believes.