Wasteful Wednesday with Wil Reynolds #14 – Keyword of the Week “Quiz Sites”

Watch Episode 14 on "Quiz Sites": 

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Read the Transcript of Episode 14 on "Quiz Sites":

Howdy folks, Wil Reynolds here and I'm back for another Wasteful Wednesday.

This Wednesday, I want to remind you of an oldie, but goodie, Homework and Quiz sites, they are definitely taking money out of your accounts, and you pretty much have no idea that you're spending that money. So let me go ahead and show you how by combining paid search data and SEO data, you can hold on to those dollars. Let's go.

Keyword of the Week: "Quiz Sites"

Ex. Quizlet

Okay. So what I'm showing you here is how Quizlet, Quizlet, it's a quiz site that is ranking in the top 20, and what I've done is I've pulled down every search term for every client in the last 12 months, and I can see that $67,000 were spent on terms where Quizlet was a good quote, on quote answer.

I can pick any of my clients at any point and see, where are they spending money, but for now, what I'm going to do is show you. We have all these different account names here, and I can see how much more my CPA is.

So how much more does it cost me to acquire a customer when a quiz site or when quizlet.com shows up in the top 20?

That's 67 grand.

My friends, this is why I'm crazy about this cost saving stuff on paid, $67,000 in clicks that were showing quiz sites, come on.

So you can see that the CPAs are usually really high or they have a -100 CPA, which means they've spent money and never converted.

I have spend as low as $19 and as high as $9,000, depending on the client, and here you can see what percentage of their spend is on keywords where Quizlet shows up in the top 20.

Now top 20 is pretty deep, so let's only look at the top 10 and that quickly, you can see this means, you know, if a site ranks in 10 through 20, Google's kind of saying, "you know what? We may not feel as confident that it's the best answer", but once you start getting into the top 10, there's real stuff here.

Now you can see $36,000 being spent on these words.

Ex. Coursehero

But Quizlet isn't the only domain that shows up for these kinds of quiz words. So what I can do is I can select the site, like Coursehero and I can see, Oh my God, Coursehero was in the top 20, I spent $43,000 across clients just where it ranks [in the top 20]... in the top 10, $98,000.

So let's take a look at these search terms.

As you can see, they sound like quiz questions, don't they?

"Brett Thao is an insurance agent for great Midwestern insurance in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is analyzing invoices", "one chorus point for Frandsen and Pennington Abrams, clinical drug therapy, rationales nursing practice, text".

My friends, these people are not looking to buy your stuff.

That is why at Seer, we always combine the PPC data and the SEO data together, so we can get this crap out of our client accounts faster than pretty much anyone else that I've seen.

Cause we're doing it only one click, we start to find these things, let's keep going.

So here's an example for a client where you see somebody putting in blanks before the rest of the words, because they're trying to search for a test question in the health space, and yes, my client got one-click.

Sites like these are the ones that you want to be checking your paid search against because they usually start to show patterns (getting into that in another video), where you can n-gram these things out and prevent yourself from spending money on these in the future.

If you remember from one of my old videos, this is another reason why negating names will help you to not show up for some of this stuff, names like Mike and Jim and Joe.

Oftentimes quiz questions, especially for the banking clients and the financial space, those kinds of questions typically include "Jim is going to the store and he's saving blah, blah, blah, blah, blah", then your dumb ad is showing up.

I'm telling you guys, this happens a ton and I am now looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars and those kinds of things.

All right. You all take care, go save that money. See you next Wednesday.

Key Takeaways

• Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to terms being used for quizzes.
• Spending money on terms that aren't relevant to your business, isn't just bad for you bottom-line, but your user experience, when you rank for a top result and NOT answer the searcher's query.
• Leverage our Saving Benjamin™ Lite tool to find more negative keywords in your PPC accounts.
• Keep watching Wasteful Wednesday episodes here!

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