Understanding your target market is a key factor in successful campaigns. The better you understand your prospect and their behavior, the higher percentage of conversions you will produce. Without paying attention to your users intentions — where they are in the buying cycle and what they are specifically searching for — your PPC ads may not do their job.
Keywords
When deciding which keywords to target in a PPC campaign, the normal procedure is to start wide and narrow, going down the list as we get to know our prospects. However, the original list rarely takes into account the prospects’ intentions. Without knowing intent, how can we accurately create an ad or landing page that resonates with our prospects?
Addressing Intent
One way to decipher intent is with the use of the keyword planner in AdWords. If you look at combinations of words, which words users add to the product’s main keyword, you can get an idea of intent.
For example:
- “Buy rocking chair” denotes wanting to make a purchase
- “Rocking chair reviews” denotes not quite ready to purchase
- “Cheap rocking chairs” is most likely still researching the purchase
Maintaining the User Intent Between Keyword, Ad, and Landing Page
A critical part of addressing user intent is to make sure the message is clear and stays the same from keyword to ad to landing page. If you have found the keywords that match where your prospects are in the buying cycle, you don’t want to lose the momentum somewhere between the keyword and the landing page. When deciding how to hire a writer for this project, a deciding factor may be whether they understand how to maintain the user intent in all parts of the campaign.
Calls-to-Action Don’t Match the User Intent
There are three possibilities that your call-to-action may be costing you extra money:
- You have not added a CTA to your PPC ad
- The CTA on your ad doesn’t match the CTA on your landing page
- The CTA on your ad and landing page do not match the actual action you want people to take
The CTA is the objective of your campaign and should gently guide the prospect through your conversion process. The objective helps focus your landing page message and determines which data you will measure to assess the campaign. Therefore, your PPC campaign should have the same call-to-action all the way through the conversion.
While this technique is not the only answer as to how to increase conversion rates and lower costs for your campaign, addressing user intent is effective because:
- You can find prospects looking to buy now
- You can give prospects exactly what they are searching for
- It prevents complicated, confusing landing pages and gives you measurable data
Paula A has been a content writer online since 2008 and right now is trying to figure out how she got old enough to have a 21-year-old daughter.
