I’m posting every day this month and feeling generous, so this is one of many crazy things I’m going to giveaway during this free for all. Don’t miss anything, click here to automatically join my newsletter now.
Tomorrow is the 4th of July and it reminded me of an old campaign.
A few years ago I was running health and beauty campaigns on a top tier search engine.
Non-Relevant = High Volume
I was buying a lot of non-relevant keywords for the campaign. This was great, because I could drive way more traffic than if I just bid on relevant keywords alone. Also these non-relevant keywords were much cheaper than the high profile keywords most people buy.
The trick is to buy high-volume keywords that aren’t necessarily related to the campaign but are related to the target demographic and what they are doing right now.
Example: For a campaign promoting a NY Times Best-Selling book on healthy cooking ideas, I targeted the keyword “pizza coupon”.
If you’ve never tried it you need to start today. Some search engines don’t like the practice but in my opinion there is nothing wrong with advertising to the people you’re targeting using keywords that they would be interested in.
I had hundreds of keywords in my list and a decent amount of traffic. For several months the campaign plugged along at a steady pace.
Then, It Happened
A few days before July 4 one keyword phrase started doing acrobatics. It picked up in volume and I noticed a big uptick in conversions.
The volume wasn’t huge, but this one keyword phrase started spending about $500 a day. Other keywords in the campaign at that volume averaged between 10-40% ROI. But this one was different…
On this single keyword phrase the ROI was 500%.
The math looked like this:
- Spend: $500
- Revenue: $3000
- Profit: $2500/day
- ROI: 500%
This went on for several days, through the 4th of July weekend and on into the next week before fizzling out.
Give It Away Now
I don’t run that campaign anymore, I don’t run in that market anymore and I don’t buy traffic there anymore so I figured since tomorrow is the 4th of July I’d just give it away.
The exact keyword phrase was: “BBQ Recipes”
If you have a health/beauty/fitness campaign running on a search engine I highly recommend you give it a shot.
You can thank me later.
You freaking genius! Great post by the way.
I have a question for you Malan, I ran a campaign on Facebook and my ad spend was crazy, Must have spent $200 and I only made $38 dollars back in conversions. This stuff is so frustrating, feel like Giving up. What should I do?
By the way what traffic sources do you use for this Campaign, was it Search or Social something like Facebook.
does this require any cloaking?
hey Jay, probably depends on what you’re doing. if you’re pumping shady stuff a cloaker is always gonna be needed. If you have a great product that helps people – the ad networks are a lot more open to you using off-topic KWs.
I’ve also found that this method works well. Just gotta make sure that your LP generates a good quality score. I’ve had the scores jump up and down on seemingly unrelated keywords. This is easier to do in Bing than Adwords but obviously there is less volume.
yeah the practice got abused pretty badly (imagine viagra being advertised on the keyword “bible”) and some engines look down on it. But as long as you don’t get too crazy, you’re good.
What search engine did you use? With AdWords it’s tough to use non-relevant keywords, Google usually gives you Quality Score 1-2. Thanks!
Ha! Dude, awesome 😉 signed up for your newsletter
cool samrex, welcome aboard.
Thanks for the eBook 🙂
Thank you Mallan :).
you bet mike. hope you can take advantage of it. either the exact keywords or just the insights about indirect targeting.
Great angle. I bet the price on “BBQ Recipes” skyrockets after this post!
Blackfin, if everyone attacks it yes, but more than likely only a few will actually go for it.
Great angle. I bet the price on skyrockets after this post!