People See That I’m #1, but They Aren’t Clicking

Katherine Bennett - June 22, 2009

In the world of search engine marketing companies work to get the most bang for their buck. Many setup their accounts with keywords, ad copy and cpc bids and they are off to the races. The difficult part comes once a campaign has been running for a while. How do you analyze the data and make beneficial adjustments? If you find that you’re averaging position 1, receiving a good amount of impressions but no clicks, there are several steps you should take. 

Step 1. Check Your Keyword Grouping
Many times when a search engine account is opened, one campaign is created with one or two ad groups and all keywords are put into them. This isn’t a good setup practice. Make sure the keywords in each ad group are relevant to each other. For example, if you own an Italian restaurant, don’t just throw keywords like: homemade lasagna, garlic bread, Italian restaurant, and baked ziti under one ad group. They should each have their own separate ad groups; from there you can add in more keywords that are related to your main keywords. For example keywords that could be added into the lasagna ad group would be: homemade Italian lasagna, homemade meat lasagna, etc. Organization is always important when structuring keywords, ad groups and campaigns.

Step 2. Check Your Ad Copy
Is your ad copy relevant to your keywords? For example: If you are bidding on the keyword running shoe but your ad says: Shoe Sale. Shop Now and Save. Free Shipping on All Shoe Orders Over $45. Guess what? Your ad isn’t specific enough. Think about it, there are all types of shoes out there, men’s shoes, sneakers, sandals, flip flop, dress shoes, etc. How do they know you have the shoe they are looking for? Being specific is always better.

Step 3. Run Reports & Add in Negative Keywords
Reports can always give helpful data that isn’t always visible from a top level view. Google offers a report called the search query report which tells what keywords a user typed in when your ad appeared. For example: If you sell jewelry collections and one of your keywords is the Twilight collection, you may have noticed that in recent months your impressions went up, but you received no clicks. This was probably due to the fact that many movie and book fans were searching for items related to the movie Twilight. Therefore, you would want to add in negative keywords like: books, movies, dvds, etc to your negative keyword list. This way your ad doesn’t show for irrelevant searches.

These are only a few of the steps that need to be taken when optimizing an account, but they are definitely a good starting point. If you’re in a high position, but not seeing the clicks, start making adjustments to your search engine campaigns. The results may surprise you.