Many of our clients’ sites have internal search features, which allow visitors to the site to search for information within the site, such as a “Find a {Doctor/Center/Office/Event/Course/Dealership/etc.} Near You” feature. This type of internal search is powered by a searchable database, and the URLs of search results pages in this system are dynamically generated. With all the possible permutations of different parameters, this can add up to thousands of possible URLs. However, we have recently been developing tools for using the internal search results pages as landing pages for sponsored search ads. This is a unique way to take users directly to the page that is most relevant to them.
Suppose you have internal search on your site. Your brand, Acme Dialysis, is trying to help people find kidney dialysis centers near them. Assuming the user’s first stop is a typical search engine like Google, where they type in, for example, “Dialysis centers in Chicago”. You have a search results page on your site that contains a list of all your dialysis centers near Cleveland. But how do you serve an ad on Google’s search results page that links people to your internal search results page for Chicago?
The answer is that those long, complex, and often intimidating URLs of internal search results pages are actually quite systematic. By tapping into this systematic URL structure, we can generate super-targeted keyphrases and ads, so that when someone types in:
“Dialysis centers in Chicago”
They see an ad that says:
Chicago Dialysis Center
Visit Acme Dialysis Center Located
Near You in Chicago.
www.Acme-Dialysis-Centers.com
And they are then taken to page on the site as though they had just searched your internal database for centers in Chicago. It is possible to do this for hundreds of locations at a time, as well as for multiple products. The end results is a campaign with thousands of keywords, each of which has a highly targeted specific ad, and each of which takes users to exactly what they wanted on your site.
Major e-commerce retailers have long used this tactic. For example, if you search for an ordinary product and click on an eBay ad, you will be taken to the same page as if you had searched within eBay for that product. As brand marketers’ sites become more integral to their business, they should consider integrating this type sophistication into their paid search campaigns as well.
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