Using bounce to optimize PPC campaigns
Most of you know to look at conversion rate, eCPC, CTR, CPC, and some other metrics that you can see inside your PPC campaigns. Did you know that your analytics tool can also help you get a sense of keyword quality– thus assist you with bidding and keyword grouping?
Bounce rate is governed by a combination of these factors:
* nature of the term itself: you are trying to sell “raspberries”, so you buy that term as well as “fruit”– in this case, “fruit” is broader than “raspberry” but has more volume. So you have a trade-off with volume and relevancy, as well as synonyms– for example, “apple” can be a fruit and cool electronics manufacturer.
* your ads: you might have bought relevant terms, but your ad is misleading– promising something that doesn’t exist. Maybe the product isn’t free.
* relevancy of the landing page: you’re sending people to pages that don’t speak directly to the term folks are looking for. Perhaps your keywords, ads, and content don’t match tightly.
If you have a multi-page or multiple visit conversion, then bounce rate is a great early indicator of traffic quality. In you are converting on a single page, then bounce rate is not meaningful. That said, while using eCPM and other ROI-based metrics to govern bidding overall, you can use bounce rate in several ways:
* if the bounce rate is over 70%, turn the term off. If the term is bad enough, you may even want to delete the term and also add it as a negative keyword. For example, we sell franchises for a major fast food chain and discovered that any keywords with “home” were of ultra low quality. So “work from home” and “make money from home” are horrible– these are not people who have $150k in cash to open a franchise. Having “home” as a negative keyword also improves traffic for “business opportunity” on broad match.
* if the bounce rate is less than 30%, then something is probably working with the connection between your terms, ads, and landing pages. If that term has high volume, place it in it’s own ad group and spin out more related terms. If your keywords are tightly grouped by theme (every term in that ad group means the same thing), then you should see bounce rate to be similar. Ignore bounce rates on low volume keywords, since you’ll see a lot of noise.
* if the bounce rate is medium (30%-70%), then you can use that as a quasi-lead. For example, if term A has a bounce rate of 40% has 60% of folks making it past the first page. And term B with a 70% bounce rate has only 30% of folks making it off the page. Thus, term A is delivering twice as many visitors per click as term B– and could be bid up twice as much, all else equal. You’re still going to manage to a CPA, but if don’t have many conversions or a low budget, this is a great early metric on whether that person will become a lead.
Our lead gen consulting company manages PPC campaigns for clients who have at least $10k per month to spend. keep reading my blog for more articles on maximizing online performance. Hope this was helpful to you.
