4 Steps to Making your PPC Campaigns Voice Search Compatible

Here is a step-by-step guide to win over voice searches in your PPC campaigns.

Do you know one in five mobile searches was made by voice last year?
The trend is changing. Nearly 70 percent of recorded mobile voice searches were of conversational language. Technology is there to make life easier. And with the emergence of voice searches, it continues to build a deeper, at some times questionable, relationship with the smart devices.

That’s not all! Voice search is also turning more natural and rewarding. With a 20 percent chance that any mobile search will be a voice search, it is an important time to get ahead of this trend and start shaping up your PPC accounts.

If you are in business and wish to make a profit utilizing Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), such as the Siris, Alexas, and Cortanas, you need to know how you can use PPC campaigns to optimize voice search traffic.

Learn four easy steps to create efficient PPC campaigns for voice search:

Step 1: Check if your campaigns are receiving voice search traffic

For this, export a search query report from AdWords. And if you are managing a high-traffic account, a 30-day lookback window will be suitable to check out. Now filter search terms for the most used personal assistants. Create a column for “search query word count” and check for all queries over six words. This is similar to a more long tail/conversational query.

Step 2: Look for your negatives

Once you are done with search query gold mining, it is the right time to find your voice queries that might be slightly relevant, but not be ideal for your campaigns. In such cases, adding phrase negatives will help prevent further low-quality impressions.

Step 3: Check your existing negatives

When you have a legacy campaign, with potentially years of performance data, you have to add low intent/research-based phrase negatives to your campaigns. And to take the most advantage of increased voice search, you can consider removing negatives such as:

• “when does”
• “where do I”
• “how to”
• “near me”

Lastly, look for IPAs names within your existing campaign list.

Step 4: Build out voice search keywords

By now your phrase and broad match keywords will be beginning to pick up voice searches within your campaigns. However, you likely will not be capturing all of the high-value potential queries. So, after exporting your search query list, followed by filtering for voice search queries, you have a pretty good idea of what your ideal audience is searching for.

With the help of a keyword tool of your choice, you can begin to build on these long-tail search queries. This is essential to ensure you make the most of your voice search traffic. Later, you can add more conversational-type keywords for your campaigns.

So, with only a little bit of analysis and some simple questions to Siri, get started to start testing additional voice search queries in a low-risk environment.