How to find Highest Converting Keywords

It depends on a lot of things such as your goals and your type of business. Take a taxi service for example. It's likely your customers are those in immediate need, standing on a corner and using their mobile device to find you. Not targeting them would be huge mistake. Other businesses may not want to target mobiles at all, a B2B for instance. But don't just go on assumptions (such as the taxi service), go on what the data tells you. If for some reason the taxi service discovers that their customers use desktops only or the mobile users don't convert, they need to react appropriately which may mean disabling mobiles or if that doesn't make sense, find out why you get poor results. PPC can be a goldmine of information, you just need to dig and take action on what you dig up.

Hi DURABLEOILCOM,

That may have been a relevant question a few years ago, but not so much today.

Most web traffic is now from mobile devices. There is a strong trend toward more and more people that rarely, or never use a desktop device. The majority of web traffic today comes from smartphones and tablets, while desktop usage is shrinking fast.

There certainly are a few niches that it might make sense to target desktop users exclusively, for example software designed exclusively for desktop users. However generally speaking, your customers are likely heavy users of mobile devices and you need to target your potential customers where they live. In 2017/2018 that is primarily on mobile devices.

Having said that, it makes a lot of sense to make bid adjustments to optimize performance at the device level. Also, it is still generally a good idea to completely disable ads on mobile apps, except for carefully selected placement targeting. There are just way to many mobile app shenanigans to leave that segment running.

As far as finding keyword that convert the AdWords Keyword Planner tools works extremely well for that. The keywords with the highest Estimated CPC and that have high competition levels will generally be the highest converting keywords.

As far as finding low cost keywords that convert well, those will generally be rare and hard to find, because your competitors are the ones that set the CPC, and those same competitors will naturally bid higher if the traffic from the keyword converts better.

It is easier to find high cost keywords that convert at an even higher ratio to cost than to find low cost keywords that are profitable. You see the higher than average CPCs often intimidate less sophisticated advertisers, allowing you to make a higher ratio of profit to cost on those "scary" looking keywords.

In the end, your success will have a lot more to do with your marketing strategy, well crafted marketing messages, and landing page optimizations, than it does to rare keyword selections. Focus your efforts there and many keywords that are unprofitable for competitors will yield much profit for you.

HTH,

Don Burk