You’re not paying for all of the pay-per-click traffic that visits your site. This article will show you how to increase your free traffic by optimizing your ‘paste-through rate’.
Here’s a brief explanation of free traffic and paste-throughs:
In addition to clicking on your PPC ads, people visiting the search engine results page (SERP) may also be copying the URL from your ad and pasting it into their browser. I was blissfully unaware of said behavior until I uncovered a bunch of these as 404s in my log data. For whatever reason (lack of trust, privacy concerns, etc) people seem to be copying and pasting the Display URL instead of clicking on the ad.
Let’s take a look in more detail…
Faced with the ad below, a user can do one of the following:
Buy Stuff from Me
I sell great stuff online; visit my
site today for great deals on stuff
www.NotaScam.com/Buy-Stuff
- Ignore it (doh!)
- Click the ad Header link (this is what Google wants them to do, $$$)
- Type in ‘www.notascam.com’ (your root domain) into another browser window (shows up as direct traffic in your web analytics tool)
- Copy and paste the Display URL (www.NotaScam.com/Buy-Stuff) into a browser (also shows up as direct traffic in your web analytics tool)
If a visitor opts for #3 or #4 above, we essentially got their visit for free (as in beer) [As an aside, we could get into a navel-gazing argument over whether the impression with out a click hurts you enough in terms of Quality Score to be considered 'not free', but it's getting late.]
The third isn’t terribly trackable, but I’m convinced it happens based on the fact that the less-likely #4 happens with regularity. The fourth is most interesting for this discussion, because it’s free traffic that’s trackable. Let’s call the occurrence of #4 as a percent of impressions ‘paste-through rate’.
Without getting into too much quibbling here, let’s say a standard clickthrough rate is between 2-10%. These means there are 10-50 times the number of impressions as there are clicks. That sounds like a lot of leverage. Since 5-10% of impressions result in #2, between 90 and 95% of impressions ignore or key in a domain, meaning, we can actually increase the amount of free traffic by simply increasing impressions.
Adwords lets you choose both a display URL and destination URL for an ad. According to the Policy below, Google Display URL Policy, the display URL doesn’t have to be the same as the destination; it can act more like a vanity URL to drive a higher CTR:
Display URL
- Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you’re advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they’ll be taken to when they click on your ad.
- Where you have keyword URLs, these are considered to be your destination URLs, and the display URL must accurately reflect them.
- Your display URL must include the domain extension, for example: .com, .net, or .org.
- If your actual destination URL link is too long to use as your display URL, use a shortened version (such as your homepage) that meets the character limit for this field.Example:
Destination URL: http://www.TravelingDog.net/toys.html
Display URL: www.TravelingDog.net
In English, this means that, as long as the display URL belongs to the same domain as the destination URL, the link doesn’t actually have to work, which gives us a lot of leeway in how we can implement.
Here’s the plan:
- Use unique & eye-catching Display Urls
- 301 redirect those pages to existing landing pages
- Look at your logfile data to see how many requests you receive for the redirected display URL. These are trackable, free visits, or paste-throughs!
- Show the free traffic stats to clients and bosses
- Strategically show more impressions of Keywords & Display URLs that get high ‘paste-through rate’
- Bask in your brilliance
Let me know how it works for you!
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