PPC + High CI score = BIG profits!

It’s a sad fact: The vast majority of PPC campaigns are bottomless money-pits. Month after month, advertisers throw money into pay-per-click without even understanding how it works.

This, has driven hundreds (maybe thousands) of webmasters to drop PPC altogether and try to find new ways to advertise their websites online.

While there are many reasons why a PPC campaign can fail, the most common one is when advertisers target the wrong set of keywords.

You see, the concept that most webmasters don’t understand is that keyword targeting is an entirely different game when you’re doing it for PPC than when you’re doing it for SEO. The main difference lies in the state of mind of visitors that you are targeting. Because even when they are all potential buyers, each one of them is in a different place in the buying process.

When someone types in “blue widget” in their browser, they are most likely looking for information on (blue widgets): How they work, which one is the best, how they compare to red and green widgets, the kinds of models available, which one may be right for them, etc.

However, when someone searches for phrases like “Buy blue widget”, “Discount blue widget” or even “Blue widgets in New York”. Those are searches of people who have already decided to spend money on a blue widget and they are looking for the best place to buy one from.

This difference is what experts are calling “Commercial Intention”.

Doing SEO on the main page of your website to rank well for “Blue widget” may be a smart move if you are providing the visitor with good and valuable information for their research. But this is definitely not what you want to do for the pages where you are actually selling the blue widgets. At least not if you’re looking for a good conversion ratio.

The same goes for any pay-per-click campaigns you’re running. If you are bidding on the term “Blue widget” and sending those visitors to a page where you are selling blue widgets, you may get TONS of clicks, but very few buyers… and the worst part is that if you’re bidding for such a generic term you will probably pay through the nose for each click it gets!

On the other hand, if you bid for keywords or phrases that have commercial intention, chances are you’ll pay less per click and get fewer visitors from them… but the visitor-to-sale rate of your page will increase a LOT.

Commercial intention should not be confused with “The long tail”. There are many long-tail keyphrases that have no commercial intention whatsoever and, of course, produce dismal results in PPC.

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How to figure out the commercial intention of your keywords

The easiest way to do it is by using an obscure and little-known tool in MSN adcenter labs. It is appropriately called “Detecting Online Commercial Intention“. This cool tool allows you to “Predict a customer’s intension to buy, sell, or complete another kind of transaction based on her search queries or recently visited URLs.”

For your next PPC campaign, take the extra time to analyze your keywords (and landing pages) and actually bid on those with a high commercial intention score. Chances are you’ll considerably increase your campaign’s profitability.

But as usual, keep in mind that this is just a tool… and no tool will ever replace a little common sense!