Let's keep that search sales funnel up as we continue.

Avoid the Browsing Phase of Search Sales

Another way of understanding what is too broad or severely general (top row in the funnel) is best understood when the search sales funnel is incorporated into your keyword selection. Browsing is also appropriately also referred to in search engine marketing as discovery. The two terms are relatively synonymous, and although divisions could be drawn, for the purpose of teaching why the browsing phase is not necessarily where you want to show up.

Browsers are attempting to discover new ideas, casually researching or uncover possible solutions to fill a particular need. In the scenario above, back pain has many causes, and correlatively almost as many solutions. For this reason, including the phrase "upper back pain" in order to sell an ErgoBall chair is unwise, lowers your CTR and increases the number of clicks that you pay for without a favorable odds of it leading to a sale. So why waste your money in this phase when your searching audience hasn't even made up their mind yet? To influence their future decisions? Let your plentiful competitors do that. They may scoop up more sales by volume doing this if they can create retail brand loyalty, but on the other hand they will compete with chiropractors and host of other back pain solutions while paying a higher price for their clicks thereby reducing the average daily numbers of clicks, evening the number out of total sales. Let your competitors be less efficient with their ad spend than you are with yours.

The Product Solutions Phase

Depending on your business model or product, the product solutions phase (second row to the top) maybe an appropriate phase in which to enter the search process. Then again, it may be too broad yet. This phase is the second within the buying process whereby users have made some distinctions towards settling on a solution. They have not yet decided upon a specific course of action even if their initial findings have steered them in your general direction.

This phase will rarely treat your ROI measurement well, again because the users are yet undecided. This phase however, may be appropriate for new products or services that are fairly undiscovered. Creating brand, product or service awareness can occur effectively within this stage of the search sales process, but on a different scale than a campaign geared solely towards an elevated ROI. Campaigns venturing into this realm still demonstrate intent for facilitating the discovery process.

A client I whose PPC campaigns I have managed offers a "widget" which aids in the quasi-treatment or development for individuals with a particular medical condition. I say quasi-treatment because one must be extremely careful how a product's use is described. The challenge is that their product is unproven, theoretical and unknown as a treatment for the condition. Aside from the specific condition, they have products that help people focus - but again their product is not a generally accepted form of quasi-treatment. Therefore it becomes imperative that users begin to associate two things in a context that they would not otherwise associate together. Within the product solutions phase, you can begin to build a bridge between a need and a new or uncommon solution. However, this is generally only necessary if the product or service is not generally associated with the need.

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