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How do you determine "non-converting" keywords?
What are the best ways to determine keywords that do not convert for your website? Which tools can you use?
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4 Answers
First, you need to define your conversion goals. A conversion goal could be a purchase, a lead gen form completion, a phone call, a newsletter sign-up, a pdf download or a number of other things. You can have more than one conversion goal, so don't feel limited to just one.
If you are running paid search campaigns, I recommend using the conversion tracking provided by Adwords & Microsoft. Tag your goal page - this could be your order confirmation page - and monitor the results. You will likely find that between 10-20% of your keywords drive 80% of your conversions.
To find non-converting keywords from organic traffic, first make sure your website is tagged correctly with your analytics software of choice - Google Analytics, Omniture, etc. Then set up a goal in Google Analytics or a custom conversion goal in Omniture, and track which keywords result in a conversion. If you are running an ecommerce website, I recommend setting up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics, so you can track which keywords are bringing in the most revenue.
I'm sure you'll get plenty of good answers of how to measure and isolate keywords that aren't converting to specific goals. I see too many companies get hyperfocused on conversion and in the process, overlook keywords that aren't converting but are bringing in legitimate visiting organizations.
In other words if 100 procurement people don't have time to read your awesome whitepaper or take a demo, or they simply don't wish to be 'converted' you may have some keywords that are bringing in exactly the right people, but not converting, so those phrases get turned off.
This isn't in play in some industries but in the B2B world I hang in it's something everyone should at least look at.
Before you turn off keywords that aren't converting, grab your data from leadlander, pardot, or a similar type of tool and make sure in doing so you aren't turning off the faucet that's bringing in some gold nuggets.
Here's a blog post I wrote that explains it more in depth:
http://searchengineland.com/it%E2%80%99s-not-all-about-conversions-taking-a-w...
Thanks for asking the question!
There are plenty of good answers above. Just wanted to add to a couple areas:
1. For Google AdWords, they recently announced that they're expanding their beta test of call tracking phone numbers that they provide in the ads. This should help with getting a better measurement of offline conversions. It's not in full release yet and there are plenty of concerns including privacy and ownership of the data, but it's worth trying out if you're on AdWords currently and have access to it. You can read Google's announcement about it here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/measure-phone-calls-you-get-from.html
2. You didn't mention specifically whether you were discussing organic or paid traffic. In regards to organic traffic, I don't worry about keywords that don't perform - unless they turn out to be ones you're actively targeting and optimizing for. There's no cost (minus bandwidth), but some site owners get concerned about this for some reason. Just focus on getting more traffic from better converting keywords. If you are running paid campaigns, they should give you some good data about which keywords to target.
Morgan's got some very good ideas there - definitely worth a try and she's spot on with the need to define conversion up front.
That being said, form completion (to sign up, download or take some action) is probably the 'easiest' to measure with just web tools. Once you bring phone / physical elements in, you have a much more complex system sync.
Ultimately, you do want to get to the mecca of 'closed loop marketing' where you know what not only converted into a 'lead' but also became a sale. That is where, unless you have an ecommernce situation, tools like Google will stop being as helpful. You should consider tools that can enable you to integrate with your CRM or other system of record for sales (some of those would be marketing automation systems that can help - when combined with analytics).
Disclosure, I work for HubSpot - and I'll tell you both how we do it and how our tools help customers do it.
1) We take data on the traffic to your site based on search terms (and other sources)
2) Once a visitor converts on a form, we use cookies to match their first visit to their 'lead record'
3) We can integrate with any CRM system so that once you pass the lead to sales, if it closes, the info comes back into the system and lets it know if it is won/lost
4) We can show you per keyword how many visits, leads and sales you have generated
5) Then you can rank / sort / filter and find those that are high performers (do more with them), those that are low performers - work on them or de-prioritize them, etc
There are other tools you can consider, but the important takeaway is not to focus just on initial conversion - but how many of those were 'good leads' that turned into real customers.
Here's a short video that shows how we do it:http://www.hubspot.com/products/closed-loop-marketing/
Looking forward to more ideas & tools on this thread!
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