We all know the conversion benefits of tuning your PPC ad titles to match the exact words the customer typed in their search, breaking out what would be convenient “groupings” of ads with the same landing page into separate ads with separate, search-matching titles.
For example, we have a honeymoon registry — but brides might think of it (and therefore search for) as a wedding registry or a bridal registry. Rather than just have one ad entitled “Honeymoon Registry,” we create 3 ads. One entitled “Honeymoon Registry,” one as “Wedding Registry” and one as “Bridal Registry” as we know we’ll convert better if the title exactly matches the words the customer has in their mind when they’re doing their search.
If you’re on top of your game (and I know you are 🙂 then you’ll have 3 different landing pages, each with the corresponding matching phrase in the title, subtitles, body text, etc. Without actually reading and thinking about the words, you want the user to instantly say “yep, that’s what I was looking for”. Don’t make them get all thesaurusical on you, that’s too much brain work and won’t convert as well.
But what about those same pages that show up in the natural search results?
We’ll tackle this in two steps: First, I’ll show you how to adjust the title and key phrases in the landing page based on what keywords were searched for.
Then, for those of you who don’t mind a few black smudges on your pearly white hats, we’ll talk about some techniques for getting Google to actually show the different flavors of the page — including the all-important variations on the
I’m going to use classic ASP for my examples, but none of this is rocket-science coding so it should be a snap for you to translate to PHP or whatever language you need for your site.
MINING GOOGLE’S QUERY STRING:
Before you even get started, you should look at your analytics reports to see what terms are most commonly used to get to your landing page. If your analytics software won’t show you terms for a specific page, it’s really a cinch to just inspect the HTTP referrer on the pages you care about and if the referrer is Google, save it to the database, then after a few days, have a look at what’s in the database.
When a user clicks on a search result in Google to get to your site, the search terms they typed in are available to you in the HTTP referrer string.
Example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wedding+registry+for+your+honeymoon&meta=&aq=6&oq=
Big, flaming, sirens-blaring warning: Do NOT attempt to pull the query string out intact and just plug it into variables for your title, bits of body text, etc.! This will expose you to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Anytime you are going to use a parameter from a referrer (or more commonly the query string) to control displayed text, you must screen out