2 Creative Ways To Promote Vital But Infrequently-Searched-For Events With PPC

No search volume? No problem! Columnist Pauline Jakober provides helpful tips for campaigns focused on low search volume, high conversion terms.

What’s that you say? Not too many people searching for “Acme red widget maker webinars”? But those webinars are high converting — and one sale can make your entire PPC program worth it.

So how do you take an unsearched event, keyword or important conversion point and turn it into an all-star PPC initiative? In this post, I’ll share two creative ways you can leverage Google AdWords features to do just that.

Tactic 1: Sitelinks Strategy

It could be that only a handful of people are searching for something like “[company name] webinars” — but that’s still enough for you to create a plain-old search campaign because you know that every lead for this type of event is very valuable.

Then, you can dive into the sitelinks strategy. AdWords Sitelinks are a great way to add promotional and targeted messaging to ads that grab attention. This works for ads served to those who may be searching for that thing (whatever it may be you’re promoting), and for ads served to those who weren’t searching for that thing, but would be glad to know about it.

Consider implementing a two-fold sitelinks strategy for situations where low search volume is an issue:

1. Step 1: Create promotional sitelinks for ads that are served when a person searches for something topically relevant to that which you are promoting (for example, sitelinks that promote the Acme red widget maker webinar when someone searches for something like “Acme red widget maker”).
2. Step 2: Create promotional sitelinks for ads that are served when someone just searches for branded terms (for example, a search for anything “Acme” serves an ad with sitelinks that promote Acme red widget maker webinars).

The following screenshots illustrate examples of both steps. Important details have been blurred to protect client privacy.

Here’s an ad served for when someone searches for the product that the webinar is about:

Here’s an ad served for when someone searched for “[company name]”:

Tactic 2: Remarketing

People who are digging into particular pages on your website usually have an interest in that product, service or type of information. You can use AdWords remarketing to stay connected with those people who might want to know if you have more information on the thing they’re interested in.

Tag your pages with the remarketing code, and then create remarketing lists for visitors of certain pages.

In the following example, this client tagged the site with the remarketing code, and then we created a remarketing list for anyone who visited resources pages on the site:

In this instance, we decided that people who are interested in resources such as white papers would also be interested in knowing there was an upcoming webinar.

The following screenshot shows a remarketing ad for the webinar:

No Search Volume? No Problem

If you’re tasked with promoting something via paid search that has little to no search volume, there are still plenty of ways to take advantage of Google AdWords features to create a high-converting campaign.

In the client example used throughout this post, we were able to obtain significant sign-ups for the webinar at a low CPA. This was especially valuable when taking into account how much each lead coming to this event was worth to the company.

In fact, we found that the paid search campaign outperformed the social media campaign for the same webinar.

So the next time you have to promote something similar to “Acme red widget maker webinars,” you can confidently say: “No search volume? No problem!”