Head Keywords – Applying the 80-20 Rule To PPC Campaigns

This is a Guest Post by Justin Freid

Certain keywords get searched more times than others; knowing which keywords these are can help you use your valuable time and focus on keywords that will provide you the best return on your investment. What is known as the 80-20 can be easily applied to paid search, 80% of your traffic is going to come from 20% of your keywords. So wouldn’t t it make sense to spend 80% of your time on that 20% of your keywords?

These keywords often represent a significant amount of your traffic along with most of your conversions and generate the most revenue. It makes sense that your eyes and time should be focused on these keywords more than your long tailed keywords.

While growing a list of quality long tailed keywords through query mining can be beneficial and provide very targeted visitors to your site, the low volume of searches and revenue related to these keywords does not justify a significant time investment.

With that in mind, keeping focused and fine tuning the ad groups that contain your highest grossing keywords is extremely important. It presents you with the best ROI for your time investment. In another post I addressed the practice of keeping branded keywords separated in their own campaign. This would allow for your other campaigns with head and tail keywords to not have their data skewed by your high CTR and converting branded keywords.

Following this methodology, keeping a common structure throughout your other campaigns can be extremely helpful as well. If possible and relevant to the ad copy, try to keep like head terms together within ad groups. If you are consistent with your set up if segmented and relevant ad groups, reporting will be more clear and you will be able to make more justifiable decisions regarding your head and tail terms. This practice should lead to optimizing your account for clicks and cost reduction.

Justin Freid is the founder of Justin Freid Media, a paid search and search engine optimization agency. Justin also runs an internet marketing forum to help others learn and implement SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing.