How To Promote PPC Accounts With Less Search Time Visibility – Ask PPC
This month’s Ask A PPC addresses a real concern: Search term visibility continues to decrease on some platforms while other platforms continue to maintain more transparency. Marketers still need to understand, diagnose, and optimize campaigns even when they don’t have a full search term signals.
“As search terms become more and more elusive, what technical indicators should advertisers prioritize for smarter bidding?”
We’ll walk through three strategies that advertisers can use on any platform, and break down how search term visibility for Microsoft Advertising can boost growth on other channels.
Quick disclosure: I work for Microsoft, and I write this as objectively and platform-agnostically as possible.
Method 1: Use Behavioral Analytics to Understand User Quality
Losing access to individual search terms doesn’t mean you’re losing access to meaningful insights. You can test traffic segments to see if they bring value:
- Times: Certain periods will be more prone to random purchases compared to thoughtful investments. If your product/service sees a large amount of consistent activity during periods that don’t align with the typical customer journey, you can make an educated guess about eliminating those periods.
- Audience: By entering a viewing audience, you can get a sense of how much traffic is coming into the demographics you’re looking for. This information can be used to understand the intent behind the traffic.
- Devices: If you know you’re doing better on mobile and most of your traffic is desktop, there may be a need to use device-specific rules to target traffic more profitably.
- Locations: Identifying areas with high CPCs and low conversion rates is an easy way to ensure that the budget is growing appropriately.
Then, you can begin to understand whether those sources are worth the additional investment.
For example, if you see a spike in conversions at 7 a.m. on mobile devices, but a generally lower rate than conversions that occur at 4 p.m. on desktop, you might make an educated guess that the former group was buying on impulse, while the latter put more thought into engaging with you. A high-volume conversion team may also be on their way to work and not clearly consider which brand they’re giving their information to.
That said, avoid snap decisions. Some interactions help start the conversion journey even if it doesn’t complete the conversion action until later. That’s why signals from offline conversions and viewing conversions are so important.
Both Behavioral Analytics and CRM/Store Data Can Help Fill in the Gaps When Search Terms Are Missing
Behavioral analytics tools, including Microsoft Clarity, can help you understand how different people and AI systems interact based on the times, platforms, and audience groups they appear from. This information can show if your landing page is getting in the way.
For example, if you see a high volume of traffic coming to your site without conversion, check to see if they are trying to convert but can’t. Behavioral analysis tools can show “click rage” and whether people are confused by the page’s content.
And they can highlight potential CRM integration problems. If you’re watching users complete conversion actions multiple times, but you don’t see their information in your CRM, you’re inviting false positives in conversion tracking.
Trick 2: Open yourself up To Zero Click Value Actions
The era of AI is changing the way people discover, explore, and act. People may complete important actions without clicking on a website. The visibility of a search term may be reduced due to privacy mechanisms, but limited visibility in a full query or discussion does not mean that no benefit has occurred.
Basic questions and citation counts can begin to provide useful information. For example, if AI visibility reports show a lot of basic questions, review whether those questions are relevant to your product.
For example, if you see that the primary query is drawing you to financial advice topics and you are a general business consultant, you may want to adjust your landing pages, search terms, and keywords to focus on “advisor.” Although “advisor” is different from “consultant,” financial articles tend to have high CPCs and would not be relevant to general business consulting. This is also where anonymity and message restrictions can help, so using AI can give a clearer picture of what product/service you offer.
You can also decide to remove unnecessary JavaScript from the pages you want AI systems to interact with to reduce any obstacles that might stop browsers from accessing the page.
If AI systems can’t interact with a page, we remove ourselves from the opportunity to interact with customers before those customers seek us out. AI can only put what it can understand, ingest, and analyze as useful.
Trick 3: Use Offline Conversion And Personal Data To Validate Field Applications
This process takes more work, but gives you useful insight into campaign performance, or where AI-powered bidding is struggling if it doesn’t get clean data. Provide bidding systems with the most accurate and useful data possible while using appropriate conversion rates when campaigns need to reach certain thresholds.
Conversion rates and conversion rate rules often address value effectively rather than bid adjustments. That’s important because if we’re trying to reduce waste, we have to use technology that’s compatible with the way platforms work rather than forcing new models to work with legacy controls.
Bid adjustments and bid estimates can force auctions in ways that reflect old-fashioned campaign management logic. Conversion rates and conversion rate rules provide a strong way forward to reduce waste in modern automation systems.
A Note on Search Term Appearance
This month’s question takes on the world of Google. Microsoft Advertising takes a different approach: Advertisers can see traffic search terms lead to clicks. That transparency is important because advertisers should be able to understand how their budget is being spent.
Obviously, search terms are coming up that are begging to be processed. Some may be useful negatives, while others may challenge biases in the way you think about search behavior and how certain queries drive significant performance that you might not expect. People’s search habits are changing, and in a world where AI plays a big role, bot-type queries won’t always equate to waste. Sometimes they represent genuine, useful questions.
Another useful way to check this is to review the AI crawler bot report in Microsoft Clarity and look at the rating of AI crawler bots. That context can help you understand how AI involvement is connected to rational behavior.
3 Ways to Leverage Microsoft Search Term Visibility Across Channels
1. Find the Winners
Because Microsoft Advertising displays search terms that lead to clicks, you get visibility into what to focus on. That insight can inform better search themes for Performance Max campaigns, stronger keyword targeting for regular search campaigns, and content ideas to build around.
Note that match types behave similarly between Microsoft and Google.
2. Identify the Potentially Negative
If a query idea clearly doesn’t make sense in Microsoft Marketing, chances are it also doesn’t make sense in Google or other keyword-targeted platforms. Microsoft requires negative keywords to use a phrase or exact match, but you can still identify root words and use them as negatives in match types available on other platforms.
This additional certainty can make Microsoft Advertising useful as a source of search terms that inform the purity of the wider accounts.
3. Match Behavior Figures Following Conversions
Search term visibility helps you identify winners and losers, but real insight and optimization comes when you understand what users do after completing that search. If a query is bringing people to your site but conversions aren’t registering, you may have a conversion tracking problem rather than a query quality problem.
The reverse can also happen, if conversions increase but the queries associated with those changes don’t look right. Data extraction can help both Google and Microsoft if you need to account for tracking or data quality issues.
Behavioral analytics related to search term visibility gives you one of the strongest ways to understand why people search the way they do and what influences them after they land on your website.
The final takeaway
The visibility of a search term may decrease on some channels, but still remain on others. Rather than assuming that visibility has completely disappeared, marketers can adjust their vision and use multiple channels to capture different types of insights.
Google and Microsoft access different users, so the data will not match one-to-one. However, if search makes no sense for your product and you can see it on one network even when you can’t see it on another, you get value for targeting that impression once instead of paying for it over and over again.
Additional resources:
Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
