Posts Tagged structure

The Art of Keyword Qualification

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on April 14th, 2011

Advertisers looking to promote their products or services through Google AdWords often face a difficult challenge when deciding which keywords to target. Some keywords will naturally be more relevant than other keywords, so where do you draw the line? When researching keywords in which to show your ads, how do you decide which keywords to use and which to avoid?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive rule on the types of keywords which are relevant (which you should show your ads), and which are  not relevant (which you should avoid). After all, what’s relevant to a large advertiser may be irrelevant to a small niche advertiser. This lack of a boundary can make it extremely difficult to decide where to draw the line when researching possible keywords.

But as long as you consider the principle of keyword qualification, everything will be fine! If you understand how different keywords in your AdWords account naturally have different levels of qualification, keyword research and ad group organisation become a whole lot more effective.

Let’s see how.

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How to Strike Gold in Google’s Search Query Report

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on March 31st, 2011

Google’s search query reports provide PPC advertisers with two fantastic opportunities to improve the performance of their AdWords campaigns:

  1. Identify irrelevant keywords which can be added as negatives
  2. Identify new keyword opportunities for keyword expansion

The difficulty, however, is efficiently and reliably pulling out trends and insights from a raw search query report. According to Google, 25% of searches made each day are completely unique, and 70% of searches lie outside of Google’s Keyword Tool. While this suggests that the large majority of your search queries will have received only a handful of clicks (making trend-spotting extremely difficult), it also presents a great opportunity for identifying new keywords outside of the Keyword Tool.

This article will explore the techniques which can be used not only to identify negative keywords from a search query report, but also identify new opportunities for practical keyword expansion.

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3 Steps to Mid-Tail PPC Profitability

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on November 5th, 2010

The beauty of pay per click marketing is that it allows you to choose keywords which are highly relevant to your business. By only showing ads for search terms which closely match the products and services your business offers, you can ensure a high degree of relevancy and strong return on investment from paid search.

PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.

Or so the theory goes.

But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?

There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.

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Modified Broad Match – How To Increase AdWords CTR and Reduce CPCs

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on October 19th, 2010

Back in July, after 2 months of successful beta testing, Google rolled out a much awaited improvement to their often notorious AdWords broad match. Modified Broad Match – or the Broad Match Modifier – allows Google AdWords advertisers to place plus signs in front of their keywords to better control the types of searches which trigger their ads. Since every word in the keyword which contains a preceding plus sign must be included somewhere in the user’s search query, modified broad match provides advertisers with an extra level of control over the search queries which trigger their ads.

While this extra degree of control was largely welcomed by PPC advertisers, modified broad match no doubt adds an extra degree of complication to Google AdWords management. However, as we will see from four seperate modified broad match experiments, if modified broad match is used correctly, it can be extremely effective in significantly increasing click through rates (CTR) and lowering cost per click (CPC) prices of Google AdWords campaigns.

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One Keyword per Ad Group: Pros & Cons

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on August 11th, 2009

I recently stumbled across a Google AdWords video by Derek Faylor describing how to boost AdWords relevancy. He suggests picking one keyword that is core to your business, setting it to exact match and giving the keyword its own ad group with its own tailored ads. The idea is this: if your ads closely match your keywords, you will be seen by Google as being highly relevant, so your Quality Score will increase. This will lead to a higher ad rankings, higher click-though rates (CTR) and lower costs per click (CPC).

It makes sense, and I completely agree that a highly relevant approach such as that outlined by Derek is essential to achieve great results in paid search.

However, although Derek emphasises that his one keyword per ad group strategy should only be applied to one keyword which is core to your business, there will rarely be a case where a business will only want to advertise on a single keyword. There will likely be hundreds of possible phrases that will be highly relevant to a business, and having a portfolio of hundreds, even thousands, of long-tail keywords (instead of just bidding on one or two highly generic short-tail keywords) will often achieve better results.

So is Derek’s strategy of one keyword per ad group practical if applied on a larger scale?

Let’s have a look at the pros and cons.

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The 10% Clicks Rule Part 3: Does It Work?

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 22nd, 2009

Welcome to the final part of the Clicks Rule special.

You may remember the 10% Clicks Rule is a technique to help identify the areas of your Google AdWords account which could benefit most from your time and effort (if not, you may want track back to Part 1: Overview and Part 2: Process).

What I want to do now is evaluate the rule using a real AdWords campaign data to assess its viability. Does it work? Does it help PPC management? Does it actually help improve results? Is 10% the right figure?

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The 10% Clicks Rule Part 2: Process

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 21st, 2009

Welcome to part 2 of the Clicks Rule special.

You may be familiar with a technique I shared in recent post called the 10% Clicks Rule (if not, you may want to come back once you’ve skimmed through Part 1: Overview). In essence, the 10% Clicks Rule is a technique that aims to improve the relevancy of ads for search queries which have broad or phrase-matched to one of you keywords. Since it is impractical to give every possible keyword or search query its own ad group with personalised ads, the 10% Clicks Rule helps to identify those ad groups which are most likely to benefit from your time and effort.

Part 1 was all theory. What I want to do now is provide a step-by-step guide explaining how to identify those ad groups in your own AdWords account which could greatly benefit from your insight. All we’re trying to do here is run a Google AdWords search query report at ad group level, filter out exact match keywords (to leave broad and phrase match only) and highlight those ad groups with more than 10% of broad and phrase clicks. These are the ad groups we want to look at. So if you’re a seasoned AdWords and Excel pro, feel free to skim through the bullets or jump ahead to Part 3: Does it Work?. For everyone else who might need a little more guidance, continue reading for a detailed step-by-step guide.

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The 10% Clicks Rule Part 1: Overview

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 20th, 2009

Welcome to the first of a 3-part Clicks Rule special.

Here’s the theory

No more than 10% of total broad and phrase clicks in your Google AdWords account should come from a single ad group. If more than 10% of your total broad and phrase clicks comes from a single ad group, the keywords in that ad group are being over broad-matched or over phrase-matched. Too many searches are going to that ad group’s broad and phrase-match keywords, so the ad group could benefit from keyword expansion and search query analysis.

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Relevancy: The Holy Grail Of PPC

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 18th, 2009

I’m going to focus my first post on what I believe is the most fundamental concept in PPC: relevancy. Giving users what they are looking for. Directing them to where they want to go. Answering their questions.

Why? Because paid search relevancy can pay massive dividends. Not only is a highly relevant pay per click (PPC) campaign more likely to receive a higher click-through rate (CTR), higher Quality Score, higher ad rankings, lower costs per click (CPC) and benefit from less wasted spend, but users will more qualified so bounce rates are likely to fall (the number of people who immediately ‘bounce’ back), conversion rates increase and return on investment (ROI) will ultimately improve. So a highly relevant paid search campaign is definitely a good thing.

To achieve PPC relevancy, keywords, ads and landing pages need to work together in tandem. Messages in ads need to match users’ search queries, landing pages need to match messages in ads and landing pages need to relate to users’ original searches. (For a more detailed explanation of how each component interlinks, you might like to consult Acquisio’s great article on AdWords relevancy and Quality Score).

Closely matching ads and landing pages to keywords to encourage only targeted and qualified users to visit your site is a simple theory, and one that’s been around since the dawn of Google AdWords.

So nothing new then – does that mean relevancy is no longer relevant?

Well, not exactly, for two reasons…

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