Vince Reed explains a strategy for improving ad conversions by targeting "buying keywords"—search terms used when people are actively in the act of purchasing—rather than broad topical searches. He illustrates with a personal anecdote: following broader searches led him to research "direct sales," where he discovered thousands of MLM/direct-sales companies that represented a high-opportunity audience.
So I was driving traffic to this company page, which was not optimized to convert anything into a buyer, and targeting people that were literally shopping, just trying to figure out ways to make money on the Internet. So he said, what you want to do is you want to go after buying keywords. And buying keywords are basically the things people start to search when they're actually in the act of buying. So, for example, instead of going and targeting people that are searching for make money online or work from home, people that go down the rabbit hole like I did, that led me to direct. And then I was like, well, what is direct sales? So I started searching for that, and that led me to different direct sales companies. And come to find out there's, like, literally thousands and thousands of these MLM direct sales companies. And this is where I hit the gold mine.
