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Note: Because real cases are used, the data and proportions involved in all cases have been blurred and are only used to illustrate the ideas. Readers are advised to pay attention to the distinction.
A few days ago, I was asked by a friend to check a customer's Baidu account. It is a large account. There is no specific standard for saying large. I personally think that those with thousands to tens of thousands of keywords can be considered large, and those with more than 100,000 can be classified as very large accounts.
When you go in, it looks very big. Not surprisingly, since it is a large account, there are many series and groups in it. The key is that it is difficult to see the internal connections from the names - this goes back to the account structure issues involved in "Super Large SEM Account Management". If an account Once you enter, you can't clearly see the distribution of hierarchical arrangements, which means the structure is unreasonable. No one wants to design an unreasonable account structure. At the beginning, all accounts are probably readable, but without reasonable structural design, as the business develops, the accounts will easily grow out of shape.
A reasonable account structure is the prerequisite for readable results and executable operations. If you can't see the beginning and end clearly at a glance, it will be difficult to find a suitable entry point to start optimization. My habit for this kind of account is to simply ignore the series and groupings, start with the keywords first, grasp the importance of the keywords, and then go back to the structure. Pulling out the three-month keyword report and sorting it by consumption and income, there is no perspective. The problem is already in front of us - nearly half of the top ten consumption keywords have not produced a single conversion in three months. After looking at all the keywords, more than 90% of the keywords and more than half of the SEM consumption did not convert at all within three months! Looking back at the performance of the series, we also see that more than half of the series have no conversions at all, and at the same time, the budget limit is hit every day. This means: In the past three months, shortly after noon every day, the client's SEM ads were offline because they ran out of budget, and most of the budget was wasted...
Frankly speaking, this kind of phenomenon is not uncommon in the domestic SEM market. Many advertisers do not conduct basic management of their accounts, let alone optimization. But considering the level of this customer, I was still a little surprised. The customer was obviously not satisfied with the current situation of the account, and asked his friend to quickly improve the overall performance of the account in the short term. After seeing the real situation of the account, I was actually secretly happy, because it is so easy to improve the account performance - as long as you stop all the keywords that have not converted, you don't need to do anything else, the ROI has been improved, and the rest will slowly happen. No matter what you do, it will be an improvement.
After listening to the first step of the optimization plan, my friend carefully browsed the keyword report and felt a little embarrassed: "Customers may not agree with this stop word, because 90% of the keywords have been stopped." Since these keywords are not Bringing in revenue, then what’s the difficulty in stopping these keywords? The first thing I thought of was that the client's SEM administrators were in disgrace. After all, the other party also had several SEM administrators who had been working hard for so long. Suddenly someone told them that most of what they usually did was in vain, which was really hurtful. This is okay, SEM management is customer management first, and account management second. For any action, it is most important to get the customer's approval and understanding. So I said to my friend: "It doesn't matter. They can stop as many as they accept. There are only a few hundred keywords that can instantly improve ROI with large consumption." My friend picked out hundreds of keywords and went to communicate with customers. After thinking about it for a while, I came back still scratching my head: "Customers still have opinions on stopping these keywords. They said that these keywords may not bring direct conversions, but they may bring indirect conversions?" I was surprised at the time. Jiao Linen, two lines of big words slowly appeared in his mind: Gangsters know martial arts, no one can stop them...
To be honest, customers’ concerns are not groundless, they are well-founded. Let me explain the indirect conversion. In English, it is sometimes called assist keyWord, and sometimes it is called keyword aid. The general idea is the same: the user first clicks keyword A and then clicks keyword B, and then a conversion occurs on keyword B, although keyword A does not bring direct conversion. Conversion, but this click may be valuable. As shown in the figure below, the search terms have a certain progressive relationship.
To give another example of short keywords, if a user wants to buy a digital camera, he first searches for "digital camera" to understand a little bit about the concept, then starts searching for "digital SLR camera", then searches for "Canon digital SLR camera", and then " Full-frame Canon digital SLR camera", then "Invincible Rabbit", and finally completed the transformation on "Cheap Invincible Rabbit". This process may take a week or two, involve several keywords, but ultimately only produce one conversion. It seems that all the keys have played a role in promoting this conversion. Which keyword should the value of this conversion be allocated to? From an academic point of view, this is a very complex issue. The distribution methods that support "first click", "last click" and "average/weighted clicks throughout the entire process" all have their supporters; but in the practical field, this issue It’s relatively simple: Although search engines and SEM agencies usually promote the concept of indirect conversion, the default or preferred option in their systems is mostly “last click”. The "last click" revenue distribution model is what we usually call direct conversion.
Obviously, the role of direct transformation in the entire process of transformation is fragmentary. Taking the previous example to discuss, every time a user searches for a keyword advertisement and clicks to enter your website to obtain information, this process may strengthen his determination to make a purchase on your website. But the question is, which keyword has the greatest impact on his final purchase decision? Which keyword should be matched with all/highest conversion revenue? This problem cannot be solved by technical means.
On the other hand, even if you didn't buy or get impressions for all other keywords. However, after the user obtained complete product information from other channels, he focused on the price. When he searched for "Cheap Invincible Rabbit", he saw your ad, clicked in and completed the conversion, so what he had previously purchased from other channels Keyword ads such as "digital camera" and "Canon digital camera" are all wedding dresses for you. You can get all the conversion income from the direct conversion of just one keyword. To put it more exaggeratedly, if we know all the final conversion words, we can not buy all the search research words.
If we use the indirect conversion model of "first click" (some people do think that the first click is the most important, because it is the first step for users to start generating purchase motivation), your website has the most detailed information about digital cameras and Invincible Rabbit The most credible introduction is that users can complete all shopping research on your website, but unfortunately the price of your Invincible Rabbit is 3,000 yuan higher than that of your competitors. All the advertising clicks and consumption of this user during this purchasing process will have any impact on you. Commercial value? There may be brand value. This user may recommend to friends: "You can go to the XXX website to research cameras, but it is cheaper to go to the YYY website to buy a camera!" Congratulations on receiving a "Good Guy Card"... We must change the website page Click funnels are distinguished from click funnels for search terms, otherwise it will cause conceptual confusion! The click funnel on the website must lead to the final conversion, and all clicks only occur on your website. Each level of the search term click funnel is a new user search. In other words, the last search term click may have nothing to do with the target website of the next search term click. If the search user only clicks on the first-ranked search term ad, then the conversion will obviously be the last search term that ranked first, and the other keywords will be to accompany the prince to study.
Pushing forward does not necessarily lead to conversion revenue, and pushing backward simply starts with conversion revenue. As time goes by, the importance of the last click is revealed. Of course, being important does not mean that the last click is legitimate enough to obtain all the conversion revenue. A series of clicks that occur before conversion all have their value. The main difficulty in actual combat is how to allocate the revenue of each click. Average (linear)/weight distribution is more reasonable in theory, but what distribution ratio is used in practice is often a big problem. When the allocation is not good, I tend not to allocate it at all. SEM management is based on digital management, but we should also realize that this kind of management is approach digital management, and it is impossible to achieve absolute accuracy. When it is impossible to effectively convert revenue forward, indirect conversion becomes a relatively less practical means of measuring effects in SEM management.
In this way, the customer's concerns about indirect conversion losses caused by stop words are still reasonable. Why would I be surprised? It’s because the keyword ratio is wrong. In actual practice, if a keyword only brings conversion traffic to other keywords but does not convert at all, it is probably a low-value keyword—otherwise, why would users only search but not buy? If you lengthen the observation period, you will find that most assist keywords will help each other convert. That is, if keyword A helps keyword B to obtain indirect conversion, it is likely that keyword B will also help keyword B at a certain point in time. Convert word A or C, so as to show the internal connection between keywords. In any case, the possibility of more than 90% of keywords providing click help for less than 10% of keywords is very low. At the same time, for an ordinary account with tens of thousands of keywords, if such "Lei Feng keywords" do exist, the number is often very few.
Of course, since customers hire SEM agencies, it means that they do not necessarily have the agency’s SEM management experience. This concern deserves a detailed explanation. Nowadays, many tools can actually provide indirect conversion tracking. The Search Funnel tool provided in the Adwords account is a very good application. Click Conversion under the report options to conduct a multi-dimensional inspection of Search Funnel at different levels. In the sample picture below, you can see that the assist keyword and the actual conversion keyword are often very close, which is a very common situation.
I don't know if similar data can be obtained on Baidu Fengchao using Baidu statistical tools or other reports, but if customers use GA UTM for URL tags, they can obviously see similar data in GA reports. These tools are also free! Taking a step back, if the tools you are currently using cannot track indirect conversions, you can also conduct A/B testing on related keywords to see whether indirect conversions occur. If it is indeed a Lei Feng-style keyword, then you can observe a significant drop in conversion volume as soon as it is sacrificed. If there is no conversion decline for ten days and a half, advertisers should ask themselves whether it is worth spending more than half the money to buy such a low potential conversion volume?
In this real case, if you stop keywords that have no direct conversion, the saved budget can be used on effective keywords to gain more display opportunities. If stopping keywords to save half the consumption can bring 100% ROI growth, then the revenue growth brought by effective keywords will be 50%-100%. Almost no serious optimization has been carried out, and an ROI growth of 150%-200% has been achieved. How much indirect conversion is required to bring such benefits?
The key problem is not the tracking tools or testing methods, but the thinking of the SEM administrator. Repeat, SEM management is a science based on numbers. Even if we know that numbers can only be close and cannot be 100% accurate, it is still much better than unfounded fantasies.
Article source: SEM WATCH Please indicate the source link when reprinting.