Watch Episode 16 on "Why":
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Read the Transcript of Episode 16 on "Why":
What's up friends Wil Reynolds here for another Wasteful Wednesday.
Today, I'm going to take a quick step back to remind you why I'm even doing this, many, many years ago, about three or four, I started seeing our clients showing up for keywords that didn't make sense for them and getting clicks. We decided to invest serious time and technology into finding those things at scale, and so far, we are at a little over $30 million saved in clicks.
Like the things I'm about to show you.
That's why I want to show this to you, so all of you can also save that kind of money.
Today's Wasteful Wednesday word of the week is why, why spend your money on keywords where you're not actually trying to solve the customer's intent?
Let me just show you a few examples right now.
Keyword of the Week: "Why"
Query: "Why can't I send emails from my Samsung phone?"
Samsung, why? Why Samsung? Why?
Holla at your boy, I know that you're launching new phones, but you've got to watch out for this stuff, right? It's a pandemic man, like save your money.
Alright, "why can't I send emails from my Samsung phone?", I don't want a Note 25G right now that phone is like 1500 bucks, I just want to send a couple of emails.
So it's very important to understand, why is a troubleshooting question.
Not all the time, but oftentimes it is, especially when you get into tech and when you get into Saas, web hosting, those kinds of those kinds of places, like be careful with the word, why leading in with the query.
Let me keep showing you a couple more.
Query: 'Why is my tomato plant turning yellow?"
"Why is my tomato plant turning yellow?"
Because you can't garden dawg, but Miracle Grow, I will show you what they did.
They did an okay job, but Syngenta...
...us marketers think people clicking on your ad is a victimless crime.
So people will just click on your stuff, even if it doesn't sound like it's the right answer, cause it's sitting at the top and you're actually the victim, not them.
So they just click, click, click. What's this, that doesn't hurt. That doesn't hurt me. That doesn't hurt me, but it hurts you.
All right, let's go back.
So Syngenta...
Oh my God, someday, you're going to say that your paid search campaigns never worked.
Then I get down here and I see, uh, you know, turned yellow, alternative premium Simpsons portraits. What is going on here? Like "why is my tomato plant yellow", you're trying to sell me a painting of the Simpsons.
Uh, this is my life's work now.
Okay, secret to growing tomatoes. Okay, great. Big plants. And then growing zucchini. I got a tomato plant. It's yellow.
Masterclass, I see your commercials, I know you raised a bunch of money, I'm happy for you, but like that ain't the way to spend it.
Let's take a look at miracle grow, I actually like what they've done.
One of the things that I like that they've done here is they haven't just bastardized the query and then said, buy my stuff, instead, they're actually trying to educate you a bit about tomato plants.
But remember, I want to know why my tomato plant plant is turning yellow, this is more about how to plant them, like how deep to plant them, they need six to eight hours of sun, so it's like, okay, let's look for the word yellow.
Oh, the word yellow is not even on the page.
This my friends is why scraping out at scale for every one of your paid search terms, all the People Also Asks helps make sure that you're answering the questions that people actually have with your top of funnel landing page content.
Alright, there's a couple of products over here, but I give Miracle Grow kudos because most marketers don't want to spend any money to be on the top of the funnel, and as a result, they only show up when people are ready to buy, they miss those opportunities to grow allegiance to the brand in the top of funnel where people are trying to solve their problems. That's a good time to be connected to people.
They got products over here, so I think that's well-managed, to be honest, I think the content could be a little sharper, but if you're going to pay at least drive someone to something like this.
But I wanted something like this, but I want to show you all a great example, a great example of a paying for top of funnel.
Why troubleshooting content? So let me go ahead and show you. Shout out Leslie pools, good job.
Ex. Leslie Pools
Query: "Why is my pool pumps so loud?"
Okay, so I see pool, pool pump troubleshooting guide, and I'm like, okay, most times people are just trying to jam down my throat, like fix your pool, we'll pay us, pay us.
You know, it's a little "visit a Leslie's near you get free water test and treatment", like that's a little off from my pool pump, but you know what?
The title's pretty solid.
I looked over at the pool pump troubleshooting guide and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, where's the buy my shit?
Like, where's the like hit us up right now, where's the like, give us your money...
You can't find it, good job.
Here are the most common questions, "is the circuit breaker on is the capacitor short?"
I'm just looking at these and I'm going, aw man, and then they got resources.
I haven't even scrolled through 80% of this page and I have not seen one place to buy from them.
Hmm. I like it.
Then I get all the way down here and there's some products, I can't even click on the products, man. They're really not trying to sell, I have to click down here and then here's a store near you, my friends.
Oh, I just love this example for a few reasons.
One, they have all the questions just broken out, super easy to scan, just the same way that Google does it.
The page's full of questions, it's not full of paragraphs on these, like why troubleshooting kind of things, I think that's a pretty good layout.
Next thing I love, they didn't jam down, buy from us, come visit our stores, call us.
Now they instead stayed with that customer and said, let's give you all the questions that we think you might be asking, and let's just give you answers to this.
My friends, if you're going to spend money on top of funnel, troubleshooting style content is the way to do it, and of course, what I love about it is now by getting those people on your page, you can start to build audiences with top of funnel content that helps you to build audiences around different types of pools so that ultimately you can target the right type of people with your ads when they're having problems.
Alright, that's my rather long winded, Wasteful Wednesday with Wil on "why".
See you next Wednesday. Bye bye.
Key Takeaways
- Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to terms being used for troubleshooting questions.
- 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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