With your marketing budget under the axe, how can you justify your ad spend and show maximum ROI? The quickest answer is to improve targeting by measuring the value of each keyword. And you’re likely to find that your most popular keywords aren’t necessarily the top performers.

Studies show that when searchers don’t find what they’re looking for on the first try, the vast majority of them add more words to their search to refine the results. People also tend to use more specific search terms as they get closer to a buying decision.

Dane Christensen wrote an excellent article on the cost-effectiveness of multi-word key phrases, often referred to as long-tail keywords. Dane points out that these key phrases tend to be less competitive (thus cheaper) and convert better than single keywords. He outlines a technique and some tools for brainstorming your long-tail search terms.

You can use web analytics to close the loop on this process and ensure that the key phrases you’ve chosen really are bringing targeted visitors, and to fine-tune your campaigns further. This technique can also be used to measure the effectiveness of SEO efforts.

Open your ClickTracks Viewer and look at the Top Keywords in the Data Dissection Report. At first glance, the report is dominated by the most common keywords, and it’s difficult to recognize patterns with such a wide variety of keyword themes. To pull the long tail into view and focus your analysis, create segments based on each of your key concepts (as noted in step 1 of Dane’s article). Use the Advanced Segments wizard to create segments of visitors who used a search engine query that "contains the string", and use a basic root word for each key concept.

After your data is analyzed, you can scroll down the report to find a table of top keyword phrases for each of the segments you created. You can compare the Average Time on Site and Short Visits to determine which visitors are engaging with your site. If you’re using revenue tracking, you’ll also see Purchases, Conversion Rates and Revenue. If you don’t use revenue tracking, I strongly encourage you to set site goals in your Funnel Report, which will add columns to the Data Dissection Report for Reached Goal and % Reached Goal.

Since long-tail terms have inherently low volume, it’s important not to judge your results based on a small amount of data. Instead, look for patterns within each of your key concept segments. Do certain modifiers seem to have a consistent positive or negative impact on a variety of specific phrases? You can even create separate segments based on those modifiers to see their effect on key phrases outside of a specific key concept. Then, you can use this data to continually refine your keywords and improve your search ROI.

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About the Author

Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.

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