Are You Seeing A Dip In Traffic?

Ryan Faria - June 26, 2009

For many advertisers who run a search engine marketing campaign, it is very common to get comfortable with a certain amount of visitors.  Over the life of a campaign, advertisers may notice trends in regard to their paid efforts. 

But, what should an advertiser do when the amount of paid traffic to the site begins to decrease or halt completely?  It is important for advertisers to try multiple methods in order to maintain a consistent performance level.  By using an analytics platform, such as Google Analytics, advertisers can identify which keywords are causing the campaign bounce rate to increase.  An analytics program can also help you identify geographic locations where your ads are performing better.

Checking the Quality Score or Quality Index of your keywords gives you an indication of whether or not a low score could be preventing your ads from showing.  Also, by reviewing your minimum bid requirements, you can see if your keyword bids are not aggressive enough to have your ads display on the first page of search results.  It is important to check cost per click bids regularly, as over time certain industries may become more competitive; this may cause cost per click bids to increase.

If keyword bids and quality scores are not the problem, it might be your ad copy; stale ad copy can certainly impact campaign performance.  Creating fresh, exciting ads with captivating offers or specials can not only attract new visitors to your site, but also improve the amount of sales you generate.

Another suggestion to increase your online marketing campaign performance is to conduct new keyword research.  Many advertisers consistently use the same keywords in their paid online efforts year after year and do not perform research on what additional keywords may be added to the campaign.  The addition of new keywords allows advertisers to capitalize on ones that they have not in the past.  Also, by using geographic analytics data, you can include geographic areas within your keywords to attract new customers. Geo-specific keywords resonate highly with searchers and more often than not, lead to significantly higher conversion rates.

Increasing campaign performance is never an easy task, once the traffic has slowed to a crawl or stopped completely.  However, by habitually reviewing different aspects of the campaign you may be able to prevent dips in traffic from even happening.