May
11
How to Make a PPV Keyword List
The biggest mistake you can make with creating a PPV keyword list is taking your PPC list, loading that up, and expecting any good results. With PPC you are trying to find that long tail keyword that drives you traffic at a low cost. This is more of a shotgun approach. The shotgun approach is normally tens to hundreds of thousands of keywords and that is just too much for a PPV campaign.
One thing you need to realize when making a keyword list for PPV is how the software works and does keyword matches and what the limitations are. The software out there that PPV networks utilize are scanning the URL. The software then brings back a list of potential keywords and the shortest term often gets triggered. So while it’s great to have a giant list of every variation of a keyword it often times doesn’t do anything for you in regards to actual targeting. These giant lists also cause a management headache for you as the advertiser because the self-service websites that these networks have is not optimized to handle that many keywords. If the website is not optimized to handle this amount then you gotta figure that they don’t want you using that many keywords.
When you are starting a new campaign, they key is to keep the list small, anywhere between 30-50 keywords is perfect. These will be the most targeted keywords you can think of that are relative to the website you are trafficking. I call these Tier 1 keywords. Think of it like a dartboard where the bulls eye is your group of Tier 1 keywords. As you start seeing success with those keywords you start expanding your list broader and broader until you have a really good PPV keyword list.
Example PPV Keyword list for a website that sells computers:
Tier 1
tigerdirect.com/sectors/computers
newegg.com/Store/Computer
buy desktop computer
buy network card
…
Tier 2
laptop computer
computer part
hard drive
…
Tier 3
computer
laptop
usb
…
Tier 4
back to school
word processing
new office
…
As you can see, Tier 1 is where you will make a majority of your sales as they are the most targeted, but at the same time there will not be a lot of traffic. Focus on building out that Tier first and then expand out your list. With the lower Tier’s you can see how the keywords get broader and broader, ultimately ending in Tier 4 where the words are now just instances where a computer is used.
PPV keyword lists are only one piece of the PPV puzzle and the next, probably most crucial part, is tracking. I’ll be covering that in the next post. Once you have the list you’ll need to be able to figure out exactly what is working and the only way to do this is keyword level tracking. All PPV networks are based on a bidding system in which individual advertisers are bidding on the price they are willing to pay for a keyword. If you don’t know how well a specific keyword is doing for you, than you may be paying too much for that word and actually losing money on a “good” keyword.
I’ll cover the importance of tracking PPV campaigns next…
