Marketing on the web is demand-driven. Searchers are looking for answers. The best way to dominate the game is to become the best answer to their questions. This is why it’s important to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. (Read that post before the rest of this one)
It’s also why you don’t copy and paste the same ads into all of your ad groups talking about yourself and what makes you great.
You’re only great if you’re great at answering the searcher’s question. If your paid search campaigns are not organized around this foundational principle, you need to go back and make this happen. The above example happens all the time. The searcher is looking for a specific type of business card. They have questions about it that they are looking to get answered. The search is matched with an ad that doesn’t attempt to answer them. It attempts to persuade the searcher that they are the best. The searcher doesn’t care about your opinion of yourself. They care about getting their questions answered. If you’re looking at your metrics and crunching the numbers every month without first getting this right, go back and do this first.
Demands change. So questions change. What are searchers asking right now compared to what they were asking last year? Has anything changed? Is it the same? This is how you become the best answer to your searcher’s questions right now, not just when you initially did keyword research at the start of your account. Then, when you find out what’s going on in your market, you can organize your ads to be the right answer to the questions searchers are asking in their search queries.
Why is this so important? If you don’t answer the questions your prospects are asking right now, the performance downward spiral begins…
- Searches get matched to ads that don’t answer the searcher’s questions
- CTRs drop
- Impressions drop because search engines don’t want to show irrelevant ads to users
- Quality score suffers
- Money is wasted
In order to keep this downward spiral from happening, it’s important that paid search managers prioritize time in their accounts to include dynamic keyword research, the creation of ads that answer new and rising searches, and the organization of those ads to show to the right search queries. Without getting this right first, all other optimizations are done on sinking sand.