4 Easy Steps to Prepare Your PPC Campaigns for Voice Search

Did you know that last year 1 in 5 mobile searches were made via voice search versus typing into the search bar? And by the way, the 70 percent of mobile voice searches were of conversational language.

Did you know that you can tell Alexa to order a pizza from Domino’s?

 Alexa, It’s Me, Are You There? Stop Laughing at Me!

This is another approval that the voice search is becoming more natural and conversational today.
So it is a MUST for all marketers and advertisers to start preparing PPC campaigns for voice search.

•  Voice search queries are typically longer, typically over 5 or 6 words
• Since voice search is conversational, these searches are often in the form of a question versus our usually typed phrases, think of those main question asking terms: How, What, When, Where, Why?
• Voice has high local worth (think “near me” searches)

Search Engine Journal recommends 4 easy steps for preparing your PPC campaigns for voice search.

Step 1: See If Your Campaigns Are Already Receiving Voice Search Traffic

To implement this step the advertiser needs to export a search query report from AdWords.

If you are managing a high-traffic account, a 30-day look-back window should be ok to see whether you are receiving any voice traffic.

Then you need to filter search terms for the most used personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, or OK Google.

After this step, Excel comes to help.

Create a column for “search query word count” and look at all queries over six words, as this is likely a more long tail/conversational query.

To do this, you can use this handy Excel formula:

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,” “,””))+1)

Note, these long tail keywords might not be valuable to add as primary keywords, but it should give you an idea of what intent your audience has, and how to react to that intent.

Step 2: Add Your Negatives

After the shortlisting and ideation process, you might find that several of your voice queries, might not be ideal for your campaign.

For example, in the search queries, you have “ok google who is the strongest person in the world of u.s.” is not a valuable query for my campaign.

So you need to add negative phrases such as “strongest person” and “in the world” which will prevent the low-quality impressions.

Step 3: Review Your Existing Negatives

If you are running a legacy campaign with years of performance data, it is important to add low intent/research-based phrase negatives to your campaigns.
And more importantly, to take the most advantage of increased voice search, consider removing negatives such as:
“how to”

“near me”

“when does”

“where do I”

Step 4: Build out Voice Search Keywords for Your Campaigns

After exporting and having your search query list and filtering for voice search queries, you will have a good idea of what your ideal audience is searching for. Which is great!
Use a keyword research tool of your choice and begin to build on these longer-tail search queries to ensure you make the most of your voice search traffic.

Start adding more conversational-type keywords to your campaigns and adjust bids accordingly based on purchase intent.

For instance, I am more willing to bid higher on a search term including “find a gym near me,” as this is a higher intent search compared to “ok google what are the best gyms in austin.”

However, both of these search terms are still valuable.
The first term “find a gym near me” has potential to serve within Google’s map ads. The local search ads are available to advertisers utilizing location extensions in AdWords.

Also, take into consideration some of those question type queries– Who? What? When? Where? Why? – and matching those terms to their considered intent.

For example, someone searching “where is the nearest gym?” is more likely ready to take action than the search “how to join a gym?”

So, now you are so close to winning at paid voice search.
With only a little bit of analysis help from Excel and some simple questions to Siri, you can start testing additional voice search queries in a low-risk environment.

Need assistance to advertise more professionally? Reach out to Digilite, we are AdWords Certified Partner, and we will be so happy to listen to your story.

Tereza Marketing Manager

Tereza is an experienced digital marketing manager known for her effective strategies that drive business growth. She brings extensive experience in using digital channels to boost brand visibility and engagement.

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