​Bing Ads' new study shows which keyword combinations drive content ROI for financial services brands.

​While content for SEO drives organic traffic from search to branded websites, marketers sometimes want to support their efforts with pay-per-click models. Positioning advertisements in SERPs can produce traffic upticks, but professionals must put in time to evaluate keyword trends to maximize ROI.

Bing Ads has released a new study that analyzed more than 250,000 unique PPC campaigns in the financial services industry. The research​ ​looks at sub-verticals in the space like banking, auto insurance, credit cards and health insurance. Bing Ads discovered certain keywords perform well in search ad titles, but fail in descriptions. More, results varied across verticals, highlighting how important it is for marketers to regularly evaluate their campaigns. Some key takeaways include:

  • Auto Insurance: Including the word ‘Safe’ in the ad title had a positive effect, while terms ‘Fast’ and ‘Savings’ performed well in the ad description​.​
  • Banking: Ads should have the word ‘Rate’ in their titles to maximize content ROI.
  • Credit Cards: Three of the five top-performing titles include percentage signs, suggesting people care about APR more than anything else.
  • Health Insurance: Use ‘Affordable’ over ‘Saving.’

Bing Ads insights help financial services brands develop search marketing campaigns that elicit responses from their target audiences. However, companies across industries want to understand where opportunities lie with PPC advertising, and Bing’s newly released Keyword Distribution Graph can help.

Bing’s Senior Program Manager Young Shi wrote in a recent blog post that, after soliciting feedback from beta users, the Microsoft-owned search engine has launched the Graph for public usage. Webmasters can find the feature under the ‘Keyword tab’ in their Bing Ads online interfaces.

Marketers can filter through various graphs and metrics to uncover the keywords that have proven effective for various key performance indicators. Webmasters can select phrases to evaluate ways to improve various aspects of their PPC efforts, and develop overarching keyword strategies to fuel brand growth online. The Keyword Distribute Graph highlights a variety of marketing avenues, including:

  • Keywords with a high ROI.
  • Keywords with a low ROI.
  • Most expensive keywords to use.
  • Keywords that should be negative phrases.
  • Keywords that cut costs.
  • Keyword Outliers.

Marketers that want to experiment or perfect their PPC campaigns must take extra steps to understand how different phrase combinations drive results for their brands. While their content marketing efforts might leverage a select set of terms, PPC often requires a different approach. If companies don’t have enough resource to dedicate time to each individual marketing practice, they should stick to one avenue, rather than trying to use a single strategy to generate ROI for both SEO content and PPC.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.