Smash Your Competition With High Relevance

I am an Adwords user and I like to think I'm reasonably smart with it. However, I met a young guy recently, who taught me a thing or two.

Now this guy is a bit shy and doesn't want his niche to get overloaded so he asked me not to use his real name, so we'll call him Luke. Luke works in a particularly small corner of the property market which, due to local legislation, is only valid in certain countries, but what he does with Adwords is relevant to any market, anywhere.

His website generates sales leads in a competitive sector, but where his competitors are paying 5 to 7 dollars or more per click, Luke is paying less than 50 cents and where they are producing 20 or 30 leads a month, he's producing nearly 100.

So he's getting something right; but believe me it's not his website. He's the first to admit that the design, copy writing and general quality of his site are pretty poor. He is slowly improving it, but Luke says that what is more important is simply getting something out there and I admire that.

So what is the secret of his success? With a little persuasion he explained to me what he thinks are the four key things that make his campaigns different from the competition.

1. Keyword segmentation

   When he started, Luke sat down and brainstormed as many keywords as he could think of and then he added as many variations of those as he could. So he would start with a keyword such as “selling” and then he'd add variations like “quick selling”, “fast selling”, “rapid selling”. Then he'd look at “sale” instead of “selling” and then add more variations of that, plus all the other keywords he could come up with. He ended up with around 400 keyword phrases.

   He then went back and segmented them down into sets of anywhere between five and fifteen variations all based round one single word. What he was trying to do was have the number of keywords for each ad so short that he could almost include them all in the text of the ad. He found that huge lists of keywords on a single advert, just didn't cut it.

   The segmentation made sure that whatever was typed in the search, then appeared in the headline or the body of the advert, almost word for word. That way Google would reward him for relevance and also bold out the search words, making his ad ride higher on the page and stand out more.

   Luke said, building and refining this list took him a real long time and when he gave me the next tip, I realised why.

2. Massively multiple Ad Groups

   Because he had broken down his long list of keywords into small sets and because he wanted each set to get its own advert, Luke has now got to the stage where he is running almost One Hundred Ad Groups on this single campaign! Yes, that's right, One Hundred!

   Now, he admitted to me that he finds it tough to keep track of all these groups and of course none of them generate large volumes of clicks. So why bother? He bothers because although the number of impressions is fairly low on each one, the click through rate is way better than his competitors.

   Where they are scoring maybe 2 – 3% click-throughs, Luke is hitting between 9 and 12% and the result of that is that Google rewards him for his high relevance, by giving him good positions and charging him less for them.

   Luke has realised that high relevance is one of the most important things you can achieve in Adwords marketing, but it was his next tip that really made me see why he has been so successful.

3. Separate landing pages

   The final link in Luke's chain of direct relevance is that he has built around 20 different landing pages on his site. He grouped the 100 Ad Groups he has running in his campaign, into sets of around four or five which have broad similarities and use keywords that fall into the same sub-niche. These four or five adverts are then all pointed to the same landing page which he has optimized for those keyword sets alone. This is reflected in his use of H tags, meta tags and keyword density.

   Again, this represents a lot of work, although due to a lot of common supporting content, not as much work as you might think. Luke said that he had considered making a landing page for every single one of his 100 Groups but figured that was a step too far, because he wants to devote more of his time to his last strategy.

4. Testing

   This final one should be a part of most people's strategies and is widely known but it still amazes me how few people do this. Most campaigns are created and left to live or die on their own without any changes. I know from my own experience that it is perfectly possible to double, treble or even quadruple the click through rate of a campaign by careful testing and tweaking of ad copy and keyword mix. Luke agrees and he confidently expects to even further improve his rates over time.

So what can we conclude from Luke's success? The golden thread in all of this is relevance. Simply by taking the time and hard work to build massive relevance, Luke has managed to outperform his contemporaries by 2 - 300% on a budget that is less than half that of his most successful rival.

To achieve high relevance requires careful keyword segmentation; ad copy that uses the related keywords and links that lead to a directly relevant, keyword-optimized landing page.

Hard work? Yes indeed. But the results are there to be seen and I for one am already rebuilding my Adwords campaigns along Luke's lines. What about you?