Guest post by John Lee

While skimming through my blog reader this morning, I stumbled on a post that gave me a fit of the giggles. Somehow, the Microsoft adCenter blog had found a way to tie the buying cycle back to fly fishing! After reading, my giggles quickly turned into a thoughtful smirk as understanding and agreement sunk in. Targeting your customers with pay-per-click is a delicate process that involves a deep understanding of seasonality, trends and cyclical behavior – much like fly fishing. This great post was a gentle reminder of one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates with PPC – target your customers (trout?) at each stage of the buying cycle.

How do you harness the power of PPC to do just that? It all comes down to segmentation. But first things first, you must understand the buying cycle. At its simplest form, the buying cycle is Research, Shop and Purchase. Easy enough. Your task as a search marketer is then to segment your efforts, and subsequently your keywords, based on each phase of the cycle. Here is a quick breakdown of how your keywords should be segmented for targeting the buying cycle:

RESEARCH

• Customers in the research phase are asking themselves the most basic of questions - What is a blog? Cell Phones? You get the picture…
• To effectively target customers in the research phase, you need to cast a wide net with your keywords (I couldn’t help myself, sorry).
• These customers who are performing research are entering general keyword phrases into the search engines.
• A lot of advertisers make the poor assumption that general keywords should be paused or deleted because they don’t directly turn into conversions. Wrong.
  • Bidding low on general keywords will keep your costs down, but your exposure up on the SERPs – the goal here is really just to be seen by your potential customers.

SHOP

• Customers who are shopping have moved past the “Cell Phones?” phase and are now on the hunt.
• Targeting these customers is pretty simple if you just attach some modifiers to your general keywords – i.e. buy, purchase, review, etc..
  • You can also begin to introduce variations here. For our cell phone example – start introducing keywords like “touch screen cell phone” or “internet capable cell phone.”
• If you know anything about the long tail of search, think of this phase of the buying cycle as the middle ground between “head” and “tail.”
• In terms of bidding, you want to start increasing bids in order to creep up the search results and become top of mind for these customers.
  • Your ad for “buy cell phones” should certainly be in the top 5 for the best traction.

PURCHASE

• If it wasn’t clear already, this is when customers are ready to buy. They should know you, and they should know your product/service.
• You should be really driving home the long tail keywords here. Include brand names, specific products.
• Bidding strategy? Crank ‘em up – these are customers who are ready to buy right now! You’ll blast your ROI outta the park with these keywords.
  • Assume you’re AT&T – you better be out bidding everyone for “buy iPhone 3G.”

This breakdown will get you well on your way to targeting your customers with PPC at each stage of the buying cycle. Though you should know, this is just the tip of the buying cycle iceberg. There are plenty of other tools in your tackle box (I had to, right?) to support your superb keyword segmentation. Your ad texts and landing pages play critical roles in ensuring that once you’ve snagged a customer at each stage of the buying cycle that they come back around for the next stage! My thanks to the adCenter blog for giving me a laugh, and better yet a reminder of another great PPC tactic.

John Lee works for Bloomington, Indiana based Hanapin Marketing where he manages both PPC and SEO campaigns and is a permanent fixture at PPCHero.com.

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