The blog on adobe.com Understanding Cultural Differences in Paid Search focuses on cultural differences when running regional PPC campaigns covering countries with multiple languages and cultures. However, I see the underlying foundation as optimizing the paid search experience from the customer’s point of view.
Visitors typed in some keywords on search engines saw your ad, clicked and landed on your site, and browsed through your site until converted. These are the minimal steps in a PPC and each step should be well connected. The experience of those steps should be crafted from the customer’s point of view, fitting to their intents or shifting their intents along the journey. This includes: finding the right keywords to bid, writing appropriate ad copy for different groups of keywords, and then optimizing and targeting the landing page and the onsite journey.
PPC mainly targets customers in the early stages of purchase, where they are doing some research, exploring options, comparing alternatives, and looking for opinions. Searchers may be thinking of the same type of products offered by you and your competitors, a broad range of products, or even just something similar. An optimized paid search experience is trying to change the searchers from looking for something similar to looking for the type of products offered by you, then comparing you and your competitors, and then choosing you in the final purchase.
When someone searches exactly for your name or your products, you are already on the list and are considered, showing an advertisement with a link to purchase or calling the sales rep to close the final step of the purchase journey. However, if it was searched for a broad term that may be related to your products, showing an advertisement with highlighted features related to the search terms and sending the searcher to the feature page could educate the searcher about your product and get that onto the list of consideration. If you are selling a set-top box that plays YouTube videos on TV, don’t show the SEM ad for a big sale and send searchers to your online store if they searched for “YouTube TV player”. Instead, you should have the ad for watching online videos on TV and link searchers to the product feature page.
The PPC journey continues after searchers land on your website and become visitors. There could be more than one landing page, PPC ad sends visitors to the appropriate landing page depending on the readiness of purchase or conversion, which can be indicated by the search terms, or keyword groups if the target link is properly tagged. Corresponding onsite promotions according to the keyword groups helps to educate visitors about your products, get the products into their consideration, and make the final push on making the decision. Following the previous example of “YouTube TV player”, the PPC ad should send the visitor to the product feature page. The visitor may be new to your website and know nothing about the brand and products, you may dynamically highlight the YouTube playback as one of the key features and some other features on top of the YouTube playback, such as tablet screen mirroring and international certificate obtained, on the top of the page. However, if it is the fifth visit of the visitor in three months and the visitor came from a “best offer” PPC ad, then it may be good to show a special discount offer to the visitor on the landing page of the online store.
Although the above is talking about purchases, the same idea is still valid for non-purchasing conversion, such as subscription or lead-capturing websites.
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