Watch Episode 5 on "Technology Terms":
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Read the Transcript of Episode 5 on "Technology Terms":
What's up friends, Wil Reynolds back for another Wasteful Wednesday. If you are in the technology marketing space, this episode is for you.
I've decided to record this series to help you, the practitioner, be the freaking superhero in your company. At a time where everybody's watching every marketing dollar -- maybe you can be one of those folks that steps up and saves your company a bunch of money.
Today what we're going to talk about are technologies terms that result in you potentially sending your customer to the wrong experience.
This both works for people bidding on other folks' brands, as well as making your own branded search more efficient. But it's not just about efficiency.
We as search marketers should have a desire to land people on pages that solve their problems.
So when new JavaScript libraries come out and people search for that with your brand name, you might want to land them on a page that's full of code, maybe.
Keyword of the Week: "Technology Terms"
Ex. Shopify
Query: "Node React"
Here I am looking at the search term, "shopify node react". You can see that Shopify has an ad -- great job.
To be the super hero in your organization, you want to be able to go up the food chain and say, Hey, either I'm negating this word or I'm going to go [send searchers to] a landing page that lands people on code examples.
By the way, if you're at Udemy, give me a call, man. What's up with that ad?
💡 Check out Wasteful Wednesday Episode 4: "Competitor Names"
As you can see by looking at the fact that there's a development page and a GitHub page here, I know that for this query, Google believes it's about people looking for [Shopify] code, right?
See -- Shopify.dev is #1 and a GitHub page is #2. That's a clear giveaway that [this query] is not about education!
- Run a Search Query Analysis on all your PPC keywords.
- Then pull all your organic SEO rankings.
- Put it together and look for the instances where you rank #1 organically for an API page or a Dev sub/domain.
- Now check to see if you are also bidding on those terms in your search campaigns.
This will tell you if you're mismatching marketing messaging with technology and code messaging. If you are -- go negate those terms and save some $$.
Whether it's ...
- "shopify API"
- "shopify node react"
- "shopify github"
... all of these searches basically trigger the same ad and none of them actually speak to my query.
If you're a large technology platform, look for people trying to solve problems by looking at your Help sub/domains. Check the difference between your ad copy and the types of domains that are showing up [to make sure your messaging is aligned].
Ex. Ecommerce
Query: "ecommerce API integration"
Now let's take a broader perspective here. Let's say I look at the word, "ecommerce API integration".
Bigcommerce
[I was landed] on Bigcommerce:
"Explore commerce without limits."
I see images of sunglasses and this girl with this cool hat that looks like something, Boy George would wear, I'm looking at all this and I'm saying, okay, this page is all right, I guess, but remember, this isn't what I was really searching for.
What I was looking for was things about API integrations, right?
Square
Now, let's take a look at the ad from Square:
Booyah, I don't even need to scroll, I'm already seeing code.
This is going to speak to people. They're going to go, yes, I'm in the right place.
That is why Square might be paying less per click because I can imagine that their quality score's probably better than everyone else's because they're actually talking to the customer in their language.
Slatwall Commerce
Then I saw Slatwall Commerce.
This is another site that was showing up and while they are not showing code per se, they talk about "headless commerce", you know?
So, that in and of itself talks a little bit more about integration it's not as direct as Square, but they're getting there, right?
Speaking that language a bit, we just launched a major upgrade to our API documentation, good stuff.
1Digital
Then I can come here to 1Digital.
1Digital is landing me on their homepage, as you can see here.
I guess it's about Ecommerce? Um, but what I'm really looking for are things around API and code snippets ...
Key Takeaways
- We got a chance to land people on things that help them and if we're not going to do that, then why are we bidding for the words?
- Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to technology terms that don't match intent.
- Identify and update poor landing pages to increase your quality score.
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