How Customized Paid Search Efforts Can Produce a Strong Impression: Applying Content Analysis Methodology to Paid Search Efforts

Background:  Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) is a locally driven initiative that supported 50 communities committed to tackling obesity and tobacco use.  The program’s paid search efforts aimed to drive traffic to local CPPW community websites to raise awareness of community obesity prevention efforts. Paid search marketing is an effective way of driving traffic to a particular site (in this case local CPPW community websites) from relevant online search results and other websites.  

Program background:  During the flight dates of May 24 through September 1, 2012, paid search was used in 38 of these communities to raise awareness of their specific initiatives surrounding obesity by:

• Reaching users who are actively seeking information pertaining to their community’s specific initiative
• Driving qualified traffic to each of the communities’ web sites

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Since each of the 38 communities had their own specific focus surrounding obesity, the search campaign required a customized keyword list and ad copy variations for each community. In development of the search campaign strategy, the team:

• Analyzed content on each of the community web sites to comprehend the central issues/topics within each community
• Constructed a community matrix to identify common content across community web sites
• Created ad copy and a keyword list that addressed all issues/topics covered throughout the 38 different community web sites

Using the common topics/issues derived from the analysis of site content, the search campaign was structured into 16 distinctive content areas (ad groups). Based on these 16 different content areas, a search analysis tool was used to create a keyword list of terms that generated high volume search traffic. These terms were then evaluated based on relevancy to the content of each community’s web site. The keywords were categorized into the 16 different ad groups, and were assigned corresponding ad copy.  Features of the search campaign include:

• 38 search campaigns
• 16 ad groups
• 534 ad copy variations
• 1,143 keywords

During the fourteen-week flight from May 24, 2012 through September 1, 2012, paid search drove 35,189 total clicks to the community-specific landing pages, and achieved a strong click-through-rate of 0.29%. Paid search delivered over 12 million impressions, and maintained a strong ad positioning throughout the entirety of the campaign. 

Conclusions:  Of the 16 different content areas that structured the campaign, the community pages that qualified for multiple ad groups achieved the highest click-through-rates. Community pages that had limited or non-supportive content ultimately drove low traffic volumes, which hindered the campaign’s overall performance. An important lesson learned was that ads that linked to websites with content relevant to the ad topic were more effective and therefore key to the search campaign’s success.

Implications for research and/or practice:  The team discovered multiple implications including:

• Paid search can be a cost-effective solution for those with limited funds.
• Paid search requires continuous monitoring and follow up to ensure a good return.
• Ads should link to web pages with content relevant to the ad topic.