This article was mainly inspired by results of our work with clients from finance sector. It started with one of our biggest clients from top 3 Russian finance brokers. Our goal was rather challenging: expand existing line of products and increase the number of clients from premium sector. The major problem was that we already occupied all available positions in each product that company offered. Our average position on paid search was 1.4. What we found changed our perception of paid search, and this article shows exactly what we did.

Working at performance digital agency, implies constantly investing a lot of time on a daily basis into campaign optimization, lowering CPC costs for your clients and reaching more qualified traffic. A/B test for ad creative and landing pages is a day-to-day procedure alongside with improving quality scores for campaign’s keywords in order to pay less than our competitors and drive down the CPA costs. While average AdWords click cost has been declining over the last few years, the overall ad spent is growing higher. We vouch for that. The main reason for a price drop is rise of mobile ad spending, which drives cheaper actions than desktop. Adjusting our campaigns to mobile with completely different ad creative resulted in up to 44% decrease in CPA on some campaigns and products.

3 steps that worked in our case:

1. Separate campaigns with mobile traffic from desktop & tablet.
2. Make sure they have separate call extensions for better tracking.
3. Change ad creative to: “Search on mobile phone? Call us now”. It was our second description line and it worked better than any killer-USP we had.

But I want to take a pause here about discussing optimization techniques and to look at the big picture of SEM. To do that, I would like to offer you to get back to the basics. Let’s go as far as recalling the AIDA:
A – Attention/Awareness
I – Interest
D – Decision/Desire
A – Action

We can visualize this funnel as following:

It is not very different from our usual marketing funnel that all of us are worried about.

Yet, the most powerful insight I have ever had from AIDA funnel is this:
You won’t get interested in a product, that you are not aware of.
You can’t desire a product, which you are not interested in.
You are not going to buy a product, which you don’t want.

Formally, the purchase just can’t occur, without consumer “visiting” each state. The drop from the highest to the lowest point of this funnel can vary in time. A good example is impulse purchase, in which a buyer moves down the entire funnel in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, we have real estate purchase, in which a buyer moves from attention to action phase, much more slowly (in most cases) and spend more time at some stages. Impulse purchases in internet are as much real, as in offline world. This study is pretty clear about it. My favorite part of research is Table 1:

100% of people who made impulse purchase online, browsed for information. And it contradicts the principle of how we manage our campaign’s/ad group’s negative keywords lists. We have been told over and over again to carefully choose only high commercial intent keywords for our campaigns in order not to waste our budgets. MOZ wrote a comprehensive post about the topic, which will give you updated lists of information based words like: about, Wikipedia, how to, tutorial, guide etc. You can’t deny the fact that high intent keywords are bread and butter of PPC. Nobody can. And this is precisely why most of us end up in the Red Ocean of SEM. We enter bid & optimize competition only to try and cover more users with high intent.

We are working in Desire/Decision and Action parts of funnel, completely neglecting the first two phases. Part of users with action intent, once were just information seekers. Those who haven’t searched for information were presented by it. And guess what? It wasn’t presented by us. We weren’t there for them. We didn’t provide them with up to date information. We hadn’t given them insights in our industry. They probably ended up exploring the topic on Wikipedia, which is a great resource, but present only overall information, without giving this-week-updates in our market.

The good: we can easily expand our reach by investing some of our monthly marketing budget into providing information-seekers with top notch content. The bad: nobody will like this idea and you’ll have to fight for it. The ugly: you are going to receive much less action-ready traffic and it won’t be 1 cent-traffic either. You are going to enter the “Graveyard” – place, where you fight poorly optimized campaigns of your competitors. Their ads would be less relevant and they QS will be lower, but they will make your bids go pretty high. You should end up in paying about half of your more commercial intent keywords. In our case, we received 4 times fewer qualified contacts, but what surprised us, was that these contacts turned out to be 4 times bigger clients than industry average! They were the whales. It is a happy end.

By investing in quality content and providing information seekers with it, we empowered our brand relation with potential buyers. Some of them became our customers, just because we were the first source for quality information in the beginning of their journey. And if you have doubts about ROI, let me give an example of how it had been done before our times. Personally, I think it was the perfect case to make a point:

David Ogilvy in his famous book “Ogilvy on advertising” recalled Merill Lynch advertisement “About This Stock And Bond Business”. It was first published in “New York Times “, counting 6540 words and drove more than 10,000 requests for a prospect that was mentioned at the very end of the ad. If you work in a finance sector, this is absolutely a must-read piece of art. He also points out that in finance sphere, longer and information-richer advertisements performed better than their shorter competitors. The ad mainly contained information about what bonds and stocks are. Notice that it was published in a paper, without the ability to do proper segmentation for readers. No keyword targeting, no age and gender segmentation, no “time of the day” scheduling. Nevertheless, it was a huge success.

What they were doing was widening the AIDA funnel. They killed it by presenting and educating readers. And did it in a very common-language style. After that, those who thought to enter stock-market, knew the exact place where they need to start – Merill Lynch.

Our conclusion was simple: speak to the heart of an information seeker, and never abandon him in a wild. When you enter the funnel earlier, you are going ahead of competition and develop whole new market segment, that might very well would not existed if you weren’t there.

I would like to hear your opinion about our findings with big emphasize on critics.

Anton Goldshtein, Adventum.