The Relationship Between AdWords and the Buying Funnel

• Tweet

• Tweet

When I work on building and optimizing AdWords accounts for our clients, I always keep two things in mind while making decisions:

1. The client’s goals for the campaign
   
2. The buying funnel

What’s a buying funnel?

A buying funnel is a way of representing the stages a purchaser goes through on their way to buying a product or a service. Depending on the business or school of thought, it can have different numbers of stages and different names for the stages. However, a fairly basic, five-step funnel that works well for us looks like this:

The buying funnel has a direct impact on two areas of AdWords: keyword research and writing ads.

Let’s start by taking a look at the impact on selecting keywords.

How the buying funnel affects keywords selection

If you’ve been around Internet marketing at all, you’ve likely come across the the words, “long-tail keywords” and “head keywords” (also referred to as “high-volume keywords”). To get started, let’s make sure you’ve got these terms clear in your head.

So that's what long-tail keywords are

When you are doing keyword research for your AdWords campaign, you’ll likely start with the AdWords keyword tool. Google’s keyword tool provides a wide variety of keywords related to your product or service. Some of those keywords will be searched for thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe millions of times a month. These high-volume phrases are what I call “head keywords:” they tend to be short (one or two words in length) and quite general. In the graph above, they are represented by the long vertical bars to the left.

At the other end of the X axis, represented by short lines, are keywords that are not searched for very often. Long-tail keywords tend to be longer (3+ words in length) and are quite specific; searchers may include make, model, color choices, and even model numbers. They are called long tail because of the shape of the graph above: these low-volume keywords can continue to the right for a long, long way, making a long tail on the graph.

Imagine you sell bicycle trailers online, which our client, Wandertec, does very well (see our SEO case study). When you do keyword research you’ll find that people search for the keyword, “bike trailers,” more than 150,000 times a month. For your products, that’s a lot of searches, so “bike trailers” is a definitely a head keyword. One of the products that you sell is the BOB Ibex trailer; you check the keyword tool for “BOB Ibex Bike Cargo Trailer” and find that it’s only searched for 16 times per month. It’s a true long-tail keyword in that it doesn’t have a lot of volume and has at least three words in it.

How are keywords and buying funnels related?

Let’s take the graph we were looking at earlier and turn it on its side.

Double it for good measure and the funnel is pretty clear (see below).

How the buying funnel relates to keywords

The head keywords (in my examples above are: “pourover coffeee”, “bike trailer”, etc.) are the types of keywords someone would use at the top of the buying funnel—just becoming aware of a product or service. On the other hand, people use long-tail keywords (such as “stainless steel pourover coffee kettle” and “BOB Ibex bike cargo trailer”), when they are shopping or ready to buy.

Therefore, people who use long-tail keywords are much more likely to convert than those using head keywords: they have learned about the product or service and are using those long-tail keywords to get further details or to try to find the best deal.

The buying funnel and ad writing

One of the keys to writing compelling ads is to make sure the copy resonates with the searcher. Knowing about where the keyword is in the buying funnel helps you make educated guesses on ad copy. If consumers are at the top of the buying funnel, your copy should encourage their curiosity and desire to learn more. If the keyword is at the bottom of the buying funnel, you might want to begin focusing on the factors that are going to help them make the decision of whether to buy from you.

Let’s continue the bicycle trailer examples. You’ve got an ad group in your campaign that is focused on head keywords that are all similar to “bike trailer.” Ads that would appeal to individuals at the top of the buying funnel might encourage them to learn more about different types of bike trailers and how they can be used.

Someone who is low in the buying funnel is likely much more interested in pricing, shipping costs, and the reliability of the seller.

Where in the buying funnel do you want to focus?

Depending on your campaign’s goals, you will likely focus on different keywords. If your goal is to educate people about your product or service—that is, if your site is set up to nurture people through the buying funnel—you likely want to focus on head keywords. This approach often works well for  high-end or complicated products and services.

Imagine you’re looking for a way to use the Internet to market your B2B products and services; these are products and services that often have long buying funnels. A strong strategy is likely going to focus on head keywords to bring people high in the buying funnel to a website that will establish your credibility and expertise before moving down the buying funnel with most potential customers. With B2B Internet marketing, we seldom find long-tail keywords that are productive.

It is also true for luxury consumer products; one client that fits this description is Conservatory Craftsmen—a custom conservatory builder. Their products are costly and completely custom, so it’s important that people who are interested in a conservatory learn about them and come away feeling Conservatory Craftsmen are experts. By attracting people high up in the funnel, Conservatory Craftsmen have the opportunity to educate their potential clients and fully demonstrate their expertise.

However, there is of course a downside to focusing on head keywords. They tend to have much higher competition from other AdWords advertisers and be more expensive—that is, you will have to bid higher and/or have better quality scores to be competitive with all of those others wanting to show ads for the same keywords. And with that expense comes an additional challenge: a lot of the people who search for head keywords are probably “only looking,” so you’re paying to help them “just look.”

On the other side of the coin, if you are simply interested in finding the people who know what they want, then long-tail keywords are for you. Let’s say you bought a pallet of 8 GB flash drives direct from a Chinese manufacturer and want to sell them online. You don’t need to teach people about these products; you just need to convince them that you have exactly what they’re looking for and at prices, quality levels, and service levels they want. If that’s your business, you will likely have much more success going with long-tail keywords focused on things like color, size, price, and features.

Long-tail keywords have fewer competitors bidding on them, so they tend to be considerably less expensive than head keywords. The other benefit of long-tail keywords is that you have a much greater chance of searches actually converting since they probably know what they want. The catch with long-tail keywords is that they aren’t searched for all that often, so you have to cast a wide net and go after a lot of them, which require organization and systems when setting up your AdWords account.

Put a fine point on it

Identifying the right keywords is both science and art. While setting up an AdWords account, you should select them based on your campaign’s goals. You also have to keep in mind how those goals are reflected in the buying funnel. With this knowledge you can then judge the keywords based on where they are in the buying funnel.

Thanks to Jory for sharing the pourover coffee photo via the Creative Common’s license.