Comments on: Turn traffic into relevant traffic

By: Peter van der Graaf

Peter van der Graaf — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 21:07:05 +0000

“Make irrelevant traffic convert” will probably be a future post then! With examples how I did that in the past and how I see new possibilities in the future (with the increasing importance of quality scores).

Let me give you one example to start with:
I once was the only one bidding on the word “Nederland” (The Netherlands in Dutch) with an exact match in Adwords and I offered insurances. Not very related and with a standard minimum bid price of almost 1 dollar, not very cheap traffic. Very high volumes of people searching for it though, and with many different reasons for searching it.

Minimum bid price is mainly based on relevancy factors, but not that many compared to organic search. So I made a very relevant page for the term “Nederland” and used a page that could even score for it (third page) algorithmicly. The minimum bid price dropped to about 0.25 dollar and that was cheap enough te get some conversion.

What I didn’t know was that people mainly typed just “Nederland” to get info about their own country, but mainly to get patriotic ego boosts. At least when I used an ad text and landing page texts to emphasize that, I got great conversions. Translated it would say something like “Dutch insurances offer the best protection. See how Dutch insurances compare to each other.” And the landing page offered some (real) research about bad insurances abroad (saying nothing about Dutch ones being good) and a comparison of Dutch insurances with my client on top.

It sounds a little far fetched to do things this way, but it worked. In stead of a 30 dollar per conversion with related keywords. The word “Nederland” had a 10 dollar per conversion rate!

By: Ruben's Online Marketing

Ruben's Online Marketing — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 20:29:58 +0000

Fun tips, I’ve tried most of them with very different success rates. Google really tries to kill irrelevant ads in AdWords by artificially upping CPC’s, so some of these tactics are hard to use in practice (or you need to do a lot of manual labor, ie crating good ads and landingpages).

The title of your post is pretty bad though! Can’t really connect it to the contents. How about “4 high-ROI tips for alternative search engine marketing” or something?

By: VB

VB — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 18:23:10 +0000

I’ve been thinking along the same lines as you mention regarding exploiting high volume search terms that might not be directly linked to your product.
I find your observations very interesting, yet I haven’t found the exact method or strategy of how to do this. Would you consider doing an article just about this topic: how to make unrelated traffic convert? I think I need some examples before I can picture how it can be done in a way that is worthwhile the effort.