How Analytics And Organic Search Can Improve Your PPC

Occam’s Razor author Avinash Kaushik wrote a brilliant blog post on analytics and shares his 9 point checklist for becoming an analytics master. While most of the post is centered on organic SEO, there is a lot of application there for paid search or pay per click. I highly recommend reading it. To summarize, his 9 point for becoming an analytics emperor are:

• Get good at segmentation
• Leverage custom reports
• Master your bounce rate
• Enable deep e-commerce tracking and analysis
• Get good at setting and evaluating goals and goal values
• Perfect your landing pages
• Get good at organic search
• Use internal site search
• Compare yourself to the competition

While all of these may have some application to pay per click, the points in bold are the ones that I’d recommend all pay per click advertisers – no matter what your niche – should focus on. But what I’d like to discuss briefly right now is how you can use organic search metrics in your analytics package to improve your PPC.

Improve Your PPC Campaigns With Organic Search Analytics

Avinash suggest using Webmaster Tools to get a handle on your top queries. I totally agree. And you can use that information to narrow down the effectiveness of you organic SEO campaigns. But you can also use it to increase the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

If you know what the top queries are at the search engines that people are using to find your website then you can take that information and build solid PPC campaigns around it. Build a set of ad groups around each top query and the landing pages associated with it. HINT: You must figure out which pages people land on for those queries and be careful not to analyze the data incorrectly because some search queries could have more than one landing page.

Once you’ve perfected your landing pages with organic search in mind and you’ve segmented your markets for better analyzation, reduced your bounce rates, and established measurable goals, placing a dollar value on achieving them, then you’re ready to start your pay per click advertising campaign. Take those landing pages and the associated top queries and write ads with a strong call to action designed to deliver traffic to those landing pages with the best monetization plans. If you set up your pay per click campaign correctly and don’t overspend, you’ll realize a positive ROI and be well on your way to being an analytics master.