Building a PPC Search Funnel: Part 1

Who knew a funnel could be used for more than just some good old college fun?

Building your  pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns using the search funnel approach can deliver huge results. Creating your campaigns this way will allow you to capture the maximum amount of search volume (impression share), while giving your program many different optimization levers to best control budget allocation and maximize ROI.

The basic strategy looks like this:

When you structure your campaigns into a search funnel, you can appropriately control your budget. The idea is to start by funding the bottom of the funnel to cap impression share, then move to funding the middle of funnel campaigns, and so on. By using this approach, you will minimize any lost conversions by correctly distributing the budget based on users’ search intent.

This is a very basic idea, but one that will yield significant increase in performance. Let’s consider a basic mistake most search marketers make that will be quickly solved by the search funnel.

Time and time again, I inherit campaigns that have a blend of purchase keywords and high volume generic keywords. What happens is the high volume generic keywords steal most of that campaigns budget — and then, when someone searches for your purchase keywords, you are nowhere to be found. Structuring your campaigns into the search funnel will prevent this mistake and allow you to allocate your budget from the bottom up, always insuring your highest performance keywords cap impression share before moving up to the next level.

Now let’s take a look at this in action with some actual data. This example is from a program that I took over and managed for a one month pilot. The program started off with two campaigns that had a mixture of branded and generic keywords. It is worth noting that when I built my new structure, I did not even need to add additional keywords, I merely restructured what already existed. Here were the results:

ROI of Pilot Program

Before:                                                                               After:

As you can see this restructure produced significant results. Using only $53,333 in media budget, it was able to produce $975,000 of instant revenue, with a forecasted impact of $1,725,000. How’s that for some ROI?

What I covered above are just a few of the reasons you should structure your campaigns into a search funnel.  If you still aren’t convinced, stay tuned for my next post “Building a PPC Search Funnel: Part 2.”  Here, I will uncover some of my secrets for creating search tiers within each stage of the funnel, and how to best prioritize your keywords and campaigns.