What Keywords Are Head Keywords?
I’m a firm believer that time is one of life’s most valuable assets, and massive paid search accounts have the ability to take an abundance of your time. There are quite a few tips and tools that can help you save time and focus on areas that will provide you with a return on your time investment. It’s a matter of fact that some keywords in your PPC campaign generate more clicks, cost and revenue than the others. These keywords are often referred to as “Head” terms.
But how do you differentiate head terms from the other keywords? How do you know which keywords deserve your precious time?
Across the search marketing industry there are certain common practices that are accepted by most professionals. Fortunately when it comes to head terms there is a clear set of guidelines. The head terms are your money makers, or in some cases, money spenders. They have high search volume, good click through rates, absorb a large portion of your advertising budget but also provide you with a solid return.
A few ways to separate these keywords from the rest is to combine a few different items – first select the metric you would like to examine. Most commonly used metrics are Total Clicks, Total Revenue and Total Cost.
Then you must decide your target percentage. For example do you want to know which keywords make up 75% of the clicks for your campaign? Or are you more interested in which keywords use 60% of your budget? The answer to this will be different depending on your business model, you must select the option that fits best for your business.
The timing period you select can also factor into the segmentation of head terms. The common practice is based on monthly data but depending on your business model and if it is a seasonal based business the date range may fluctuate. Understanding the trending habits of your industry help you decide your time period. If it is a highly volatile industry you may want to shorten your time period in order to compensate for the high frequency of changing search volumes.
By combining the items listed above you can separate your most important keywords from the rest of the group. Since these keywords have the most impact on your campaign they deserve the most of your attention.
Worst comes to worst think of this as applying the 80/20 rule to your paid search campaigns. 80% of your Revenue/Clicks/Cost comes from 20% of your keywords.
For our business the HEAD keywords are fairly obvious. The heads words jump out and bite you immediately when you open our PPC campaigns. So much is written recently about capitalizing on long tail (not so sought after) terms and although we have seen a tiny bit of success with these words, they can tend to take a lot of time to manage, bring down our click through rates and ultimately don’t end up producing very much in revenue.
Choosing head keywords is difficult, some of the more obvious words go right out of your head because you end up focusing solely on the specifics. I was not aware of the ratio however, 80/20, I will certainly keep it in mind for the future. Thank you.
For our business the HEAD keywords are fairly obvious. The heads words jump out and bite you immediately when you open our PPC campaigns. So much is written recently about capitalizing on long tail (not so sought after) terms and although we have seen a tiny bit of success with these words, they can tend to take a lot of time to manage, bring down our click through rates and ultimately don’t end up producing very much in revenue.