Archive for the ‘Keywords’ Category

Every AdWords Advertiser is familiar with the all to common complaint “why are my ads not showing?“. We get questions of this nature a lot at the AdWords Adviser.

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Why not visit www.dearadwordsadviser.com today and let our experts answer your AdWords questions for free.

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Whenever you are having problems with your AdWords ads not showing, your first stop should be Google’s Ads Diagnostics Tool where you can get more detail of what is actually causing your problem and how to fix it.

Without doubt, regardless of if you have 10 or 10,000 keywords in your account, ensuring that all your ads are showing is every AdWords advertisers top priority.

But, individually checking each keyword one at a time is a real chore and, as your campaigns grow ever larger, quickly becomes impractical. It therefore comes as a great relief to us all that Google has recently announced the availability of a small but very significant new option within the Ads Diagnostics Tool that should be a big help.

You can now test all the keywords in a campaign at the same time and get diagnostic information for all of them. This is a great time saver whenever you want to check all your keywords or you have multiple keywords not working properly.

It just goes to show, sometimes the smallest changes to the way in which a tool works can make the biggest difference to the ease with which we can all use it.

Dear AdWords Adviser!

Every week we answer one of the many questions you send us. If you would like the answer to your question, send it to:)

www.dearadwordsadviser.com

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This week we would like to thank Roy for the question:)

I’ve 6 campaigns, targeting an area 50 miles radius of Manchester. Over the last month an average of 60% of click through have come from OUTSIDE this radius. We only offer our gardening service in that radius, so effectively we’re throwing away nearly two-thirds of our ad budget on totally useless clicks!

This is a common problem that AdWords users have when trying to geo-target an advertising campaign to a very small geographical area within the UK. The problem is due to the way that Internet access is provided within the UK and I’m afraid that there is no clear cut way of targeting your campaigns to completely eliminate your problem.

I could write here for you a full explanation on how geo-targeting works and why you’re experiencing such a high percentage of click-through from outside your geo-graphical area, but I’m sure you’d rather I told you how to reduce your wasted click-throughs and make your advertising more targeted.

If you want to understand the background to your problem then read this post that I wrote back in June 2009 called The Truth About Google Geo Targeting And How It Could Ruin Your Local Advertising Campaign.

What You Can Do To Reduce The Number Of Wasted Clicks Your Campaign Is Getting

Whenever you run a local advertising campaign, you should actually setup two campaigns. The first should be a national campaign and target keywords that all contain names of cities, towns and places that are within your catchment area.

Your second campaign should be restricted to showing ads to your local catchment area and use the same keywords as in your first campaign, but without the place names. For this campaign, your ads should have a reference within them to the area within which you serve.

These two campaigns will work together for you to capture the widest possible range of potential clients that maybe interested in your business.

The first campaign will pick up people searching from outside the Manchester area specifically for gardening services in your catchment area. And the second campaign will capture people searching for gardening services from within your catchment area.

Including an indication of your catchment area in the ad should filter out most of those people that see your ad but live too far away to be a useful contact.

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Adrian Key is the editor of AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. To have your question answered visit www.dearadwordsadviser.com now!

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You have probably visited the Opportunities Tab in your AdWords account a few times since it was first introduced to get ideas for optimizing your account.  If you’re like most advertisers, when you optimize your account you’ll have a specific goal in mind.

It maybe that you’re aim is to increase traffic to your website, or it could be to try and reduce costs. Whatever your aims, Google have recently introduced a small change to the way the Opportunities tab works that will make getting good advice from this tool much easier.

Your keyword suggestions can now be tailored to focus on what your actual optimization goals are with these three new options:

• maintaining or decreasing costs
• increasing traffic
• balancing cost and traffic

It is AdWords intention that this small change should provide advertisers with even better ideas to help them optimize their account. Time will tell if they are right.

Related Posts

New Advertiser Goals in the Opportunities Tab – Inside AdWords

Starting today, however, and rolling out globally over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to choose from three common advertiser goals to match your overall optimization objectives. The three new options are as follows: …

Publish Date: 06/29/2010 14:00

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-advertiser-goals-in-opportunities.html

AdWords: New Advertiser Goals in Opportunities Tab

Now, Google is rolling out globally, an “ability to choose from three common advertiser goals to match your overall optimization objectives. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your …

Publish Date: 06/30/2010 9:44

http://www.ditii.com/2010/06/30/adwords-new-advertiser-goals-in-opportunities-tab/

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So, you’ve added all your keywords, written some fantastic ads and linked each to relevant landing pages that are guaranteed to sell your business. It’s now time to decide on your AdWords bid management strategy.

You’re on a tight budget (let’s face it who isn’t) and your profit margins are small. The minimum bid for most of your keywords is 10 cents so let’s start there and work up – right?

Wrong!

The Right AdWords Bid Management Strategy

A bid management strategy that starts with low bids on all your keywords will typically mean your ad position will also be low. This will translate into a low click-through-rate (CTR) for your ads and CTR is one of the most important factors in determining your Quality Score (QS). The lower your CTR, the lower your QS, the more you pay in bids.

When introducing a new keyword to your campaign, always start by bidding high to secure a top ad position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Top ad positions typically get clicked on more often and this will help you too build up a good keyword history.

Remember, your keyword history can either make or break your AdWords advertising. Ensure your new keywords don’t start to build up a poor history right at the start or you’ll pay for it in the long run.

Don’t Make This Mistake And Drop Your Bids Too Fast!

So, now you know that the smart thing to do is bid high to build up your keyword history. But what should you do next?

Suppose that you were to start bidding an average of $1.10 for a position #1 against a reasonably popular keyword.

Within a couple of days, you might find that you have a fantastic CTR, your QS is looking good and your average cost-per-click (CPC) has dropped naturally by 10 cents. Conversions are coming in, but you’re loosing money fast.

The problem is that your AdWords bid management strategy is now  hammering your advertising budget, and crippling your very small profit margin.You’re spending more on advertising than you make in profit.

Desperate to reduce your bid prices and make that all important transition from cash-draining to comfortable profit, you drop your bid down to $0.95, so it is just below your average CPC?

Could be a bad move?

Your ad position will likely drop along with your CTR. And this could be fatal if you’ve not given Google enough time to fully fall in love with your campaign.

The safer option is to hold off dropping your bids for a couple more days. Then, each day, drop your bids a little bit at a time until you reach that vital balancing point between profits from conversions and costs per sale.

The same principles applies with your bidding strategy. Keep your nerve and hold that high ad position for four or five days at the start. Then drop your bid prices slowly and monitor your conversions often. Keep on dropping your bid price a little at a time until your ad position reaches that nice sweet spot between costs and profits.

Although this AdWords bid management strategy might be costly at the start, you’ll almost certainly get back all you’ve lost and more through lower bid prices in the longer run.

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Adrian Key is a professional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. If you found this article useful, subscribe today and claim your free ebook.

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Dear AdWords Adviser!

Every week we answer one of the many questions you send us. If you would like the answer to your question then send it to us from:)

www.dearadwordsadviser.com

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This week we would like to thank Albert for the question:)

Yesterday I posted a bunch of keywords to my account (about 70,000), but realized that I was being stupid and crazy, so today I tried to do some house-cleaning. I deleted the old campaign and created a new one.

This campaign has 63 ad groups and about 200 keywords per ad group.

I’m trying to make the campaign active and I get a message telling me “Keyword Quota Exceeded” … How can this be – Is Google still looking at my old keywords?

When I hear reports of AdWords accounts with keywords numbering in the 10s of thousands, I have to gasp in amazement. I find it incredible that advertisers feel the need to create campaigns with so many keywords that AdWords has to cap their account.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that people think such a large campaign can actually be managed properly. I can’t believe that any more than a small percentage of your keywords are actually making any money.

The first step you need to take in order to bring your account under control is to perform some basic house keeping.

Ask yourself these questions about each of your keywords:)

• Does that keyword actually bring me any conversions?
• Is a keyword with a click-through-rate of less than 1% really bringing me any benefit?
• Could a bunch of very similar keywords with the “exact match” modifier be better represented by one keyword set to “phrase” or “broad” match?

I suspect that if you work through your keyword list asking yourself these important questions, you’ll find a heck of a lot of keywords that you can delete. Performing this exercise will also improve your campaigns performance and may even increase your profit margins, not to mention improve your Quality Score ratings and make your account a whole lot easier to manage.

What Are Your Keyword Quota Limits?

For those advertisers out there who insist on creating massive keyword lists, you need to know that Google by default will limit your AdWords account to 25 campaigns.

Each campaign can contain a maximum of 100 ad groups and each ad group up to 2,000 keywords. Typically, your entire account is capped at 50,000 keywords, after which you’ll start to encounter the error message “Keyword Quota Exceeded“.

If you are using broad or phrase match keywords, then any negative keywords that you include to make your campaigns more targeted will also count towards your maximum keyword count. However, deleted keywords that remain in your account for statistical and reporting purposes do not count.

Can Your Keyword Quota Be Increased?

Although the total number of keywords you can add to a campaign can not exceed 50,000, this cap is some what artificial. It’s not (to my knowledge at least) officially documented anywhere, but anecdotal evidence would certainly suggest that the keyword limit Google places on customers is assigned on an individual customer bases.

There is significant evidence to suggest that the keyword cap placed on some accounts is significantly less than the 50,000 keyword limit suggested in Google’s help documentation and a lot more for others.

It’s no coincident that those accounts which have a lower maximum keyword threshold also tend to be poorly managed. And in direct contrast, those that have a higher threshold tend to be efficient and well managed accounts.

If you’ve reached the upper keyword limit for your AdWords account, and you believe that it is being run efficiently, then it is possible to get your threshold increased. You simply need to contact AdWords support and make your case. Be aware however, that not all requests are granted.

One common way many resolve the problem, and that you definitely should not follow, is too open a second AdWords account.

Google takes a very dim view of advertisers running multiple accounts to promote the same website and it’s very likely that they will eventually ban you from advertising on the Google network altogether.

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Adrian Key is a professional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. After you read Your AdWords Review, you will feel the power that comes from knowing exactly what you need to do to make your AdWords advertising more profitable.

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Creating AdWords keywords lists with a theme is an important part of improving your AdWords Quality Score. Too many inexperienced AdWords users set-up their campaigns by dumping a hundred or more keywords into the same ad group and then forget about them.

A month or two later when they return to their account, they are amazed because all their ads aren’t showing due to low keyword Quality Scores.

Creating Themed AdWords Keywords Lists

Advertisers ‘in-the-know’ will always have multiple ad groups in their AdWords campaigns. Each ad group might have four or five keywords in it that are all very closely related to each other. And the copy for the ad those keywords trigger will also be very closely linked to the main keyword in the ad group.

In addition, the landing page that people are sent to when they click on your ad must also be tightly linked into the keywords and ad copy for that ad group. And if your website sells more than one product, then you’ll certainly want to take the theming of your AdWords Keywords lists another step forward by creating separate campaigns for each product or product brand.

Your objective is to create highly themed campaigns, ad groups and ads that lead people to landing pages on a website with the same clear theme. It’s only through such a close association of keyword, ad copy and landing page that expert AdWords advertisers manage to achieve such high Quality Scores of 7 and above for every keyword they add to their account.

Optimizing Your Keywords Lists

Once you’ve created your themed campaigns, you still need too do more. The next step is to optimize your pay-per-click account.

After a few weeks, start to remove those terms that receive no traffic. Also, get rid of any keywords that have generated a high number of clicks, without a conversion.

Finally, look out for any keywords that convert at a loss and are therefore unprofitable. Try reducing your bid, changing match types and adding negative keywords to make these keywords more profitable. If none of that works, then delete these keywords as well.

You will now have a highly themed AdWords account with Quality Scores for every keyword that some of your competitors can only dream about. But, your work still hasn’t finished yet!

Repeat The Whole Process Again And Again

The different keywords that people use when searching are vast. Some actually use whole sentences rather than one or two keywords. Trends are also constantly changing as words that were once regularly used in searches fall out of fashion and others start to take their place.

Your AdWords account can hold thousands of keywords, so keep adding and optimizing new ones to your campaign without weakening the strong theme that you’ve already created with your existing AdWords keywords lists.

Follow this simple formula and you’ll never have to worry about poor keyword Quality Scores again.

Dear AdWords Adviser!

Every week we answer one of the many questions you send us. If you would like the answer to your question then send it to:)

www.dearadwordsadviser.com

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This week we would like to thank Mary for the question:)

I am setting up a number of ads with keywords tightly associated with the ad. My keyword phrases are different, but some of the words overlap in other ads.

For example, I have Canyon Lake as a keyword for one ad group and Canyon Lake Property for another keyword ad group and another one for Canyon Lake Real Estate.

If someone types in Canyon Lake, do my ads compete against each other to make it more expensive for me?

When faced with multiple keywords in different ad groups that match a search query, AdWords will follow these rules to determine which of your keywords to use.

• When a search query matches a keyword exactly, then AdWords will choose that keyword to trigger an ad.
• If you have the same keywords with different match types, then AdWords will choose the keyword that has the most restrictive match type.

e.g. a keyword with “phrase” match will be selected over one with “broad match” and a keyword with “exact” match selected over a keyword with “phrase” or “broad” match.

• In the event that you have the same keyword in multiple campaigns that service different geographical area’s AdWords will select the keyword targeted to the location that is best suited.

e.g. for a campaign targeted at London and another at the entire UK, AdWords would use the keyword targeted for London if the searcher conducted their search in London.

• When none of the above resolve the conflict, AdWords will use the keyword that has the highest combination of quality score and cost-per-click.

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Adrian Key is a profesional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. Subscribe to this blog, get your free ebook, and be informed by email everytime we answer a readers question.

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Dear AdWords Adviser!

Every week we answer one of the many questions you send us. If you would like the answer to your question then send it to:)

www.dearadwordsadviser.com

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This week we would like to thank Jenna for the question:)

All of my keywords (which are pretty general e.g. tax, accountant etc) have the following message attached to them. “Rarely shown due to low quality score – keyword relevance: poor”. Can you please translate this for me?

This is quite a common mistake with many AdWords users, selecting keywords for their campaigns that are too general. I’d strongly recommend that you pause your campaigns before too much damage is done to your account and have a rethink about your keywords.

What you should be targeting are keywords that are very specific to you like tax return accountant, tax accounting services or tax accounts. If you work only in a local area, you might also consider including a city, town or state in your keywords like chicargo tax return accountant or tax accounting services florida.

Keywords like these are much more likely to bring you a better return on your investment.

What you need to be aiming for initially is a high click-through-rate for all your keywords and ads. This will drive down your bidding costs.

Then in the slightly longer term, you should be judging each of your keywords on their performance. Keep running with those that bring you custom and ditch the one’s that are costing you money without any return.

We’ve written many articles in the AdWords Adviser on this subject that you could benefit from taking a look at. These include:)

Are You Using The Best Keyword Tool For Your AdWords Campaign

How To Do Keyword Research for AdWords

The Quickest Way To Build Any AdWords Keyword List

Make The Most Of One-Word Keywords In Your AdWords Campaign

How Many Keywords Do You Include In An AdWords Ad Group?

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Adrian Key is a profesional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. After you read Your AdWords Review, you will feel the power that comes from knowing exactly what you need to do to make your AdWords advertising more profitable.

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You have no idea how many keywords some advertisers try to include in the same AdWords Ad Group. I have audited more than one AdWords account with in excess of 200 keywords, all in the same ad group.

Whilst dumping all your keywords into one ad group may be convenient, it guarantees that your click-through-rate (CTR) and return-on-investment (ROI) are going to be a lot less than what otherwise might have been the case.

Many studies have already proven that people searching online are often looking for the answer to a question. They will enter a series of words into Google, hit the search button and expect the answer to their question to appear in the results.

Any expert will tell you that the most effective way to attract your prospects attention, is to create ads that answer the question searchers are asking.

For example, if someone searches Google for “nintendo wii games”, giving them an ad with the title “cheap wii games” might work. But an ad with the title “wii games consoles” will probably be a lot less successful.

The second ad title maybe relevant, but it does not use the same language as the searcher and will therefore be considered less important.

This mistake is very common – don’t make it in your AdWords campaign!

If you have more than one keyword in an Ad Group that is getting lots of search traffic, you are almost guaranteed to gain a significant increase in CTR and ROI by breaking the ad group down into smaller, more targeted ad groups.

Okay, you’re probably wondering how many keywords should you include in a single AdWords Ad Group?

There is no doubt about it, the smaller number of keywords you have in any of your ad groups, the more targeted that ad group will be. Ideally, you should be aiming at having no more than five or ten closely related keywords in any ad group.

For the perfectly targeted ad group, you’ll want to have one keyword that attracts considerably more searches than all the others in the group. This is also the phrase that you’ll want to imitate in your ad copy.

As your AdWords campaign starts to develop, review your ad groups regularly and look for any groups with more than one keyword phrase that is attracting a lot of impressions. You’ll want to separate these keyword phrases and create separate, targeted ad groups for each keyword phrase.

You can also keep a look out for keyword phrases that convert well. These may also benefit from being separated out into their own ad group.

Here’s another example:)

One client, a used car sales dealer, had one big AdWords ad group with a selection of used car and second hand car keyword phrases in it. Two keywords in particular were of interest because they were really popular and extremely relevant to the cars that this dealer sold. These were honda used cars and mazda used cars.

Many AdWords users would have been happy to keep both these phrases in the same ad group. Indeed, they both had a decent CTR and a number of leads came from the landing page that the ad sent prospects too. But they also each accounted for 20% of the ad groups impressions.

By separating these two keywords into their own ad groups, creating targeted ads and individual landing pages for each we boosted the keywords CTR by between 60% and 80%. This additional volume increased the number of leads our car dealer got by 16%.

It’s important to remember that there are no hard and fast rules as to how many keywords you should include in any AdWords ad group.

In the above example, the performance increases were achieved with only one keyword in each ad group. However, we could have easily added more keywords to each ad group and seen an even bigger improvement provided each keyword was closely related to the original.

If you’re like most, you will be constantly searching for the next AdWord Keyword to add to your campaign and doubtless you will at some time be tempted to use a one-word key phrase because of the huge number of searches these phrases attract.

Keep in mind when selecting one-word key phrases that your ad will get seen in lots of different circumstances over which you have no direct control. Some of these impressions will be useful to your business, but many will not and could even do your account harm.

Just imagine for a moment that you were to use the key phrase golf to advertise your online store selling golf clubs.

Your ad would probably appear for phrases like golf clubs and golf drivers which would be good for your business. But it might also appear for a lot of irrelevant phrases like golf bag, golf buggies, golf course, golf clothing and a whole lot more.

These unwanted impressions will at best reduce your click-through rate, meaning you have to increase your bid to remain competitive, at worst get your ad clicked on by people who have absolutely no interest in what you have to offer.

Clearly, you could play safe and only use keywords in your AdWords campaign that have two or more words in them. But that would over look a  number of targeted one-word key phrases that potentially could be very profitable.

Take the case of our online retailer selling golf clubs again.

Anyone that is familiar with the game of golf will probably have heard of Ping. They are well known manufacturers of good quality golf clubs. Unfortunately, it is also a very common term used in Internet communications.

If our golf club retailer were to use this one-word key term to sell golf clubs, the first thing they would want to do is build a very comprehensive negative keyword list. Your ad needs to appear for phrases like ping putter and ping irons but not for phrases like ping packets and ping reply.

Once a detailed negative keyword list has been built, you can start using your one-word key phrase in your AdWords campaign. But make sure you monitor closely the keywords performance. A popular one-word keyword can suck your budget dry in hours if left unchecked.

Run a ‘Search Query Performance’ report every day and make a note of all the keywords for which your ad is being shown. If there are any that are not relevant to your business, add them to your negative keywords list.

From the keywords that remain, specifically target the most popular by adding them to their own ad groups and making the keywords exact match.

Don’t forget to also add those same keywords to the negative keywords list for your one-word keyword. You don’t want your general ad to accidentally show for these keywords anymore.

After a week or two, you’ll have a highly tuned one-word keyword phrase that will show your ad against a whole range of different search phrases and a number of spin-off ad groups containing your more targeted keyword phrases.

You can now afford to back off your optimization routine a bit.

You’ll still want to run regular Performance reports, but not as often as you did when you first started. Once a week should be fine.

Over time, continue to optimize and fine tune your one-word key phrase and to build an ever more comprehensive list of popular keywords to specifically target.

It’s true that using one-word phrases as an AdWord keyword can be a very risky strategy. And you must be prepared to initially loose some money while you optimize your campaign.

But once you’ve done all the hard work, your ad will get shown for a whole bunch of searches that are just not worth targeting individually. Additionally, you’ll also get loads of other popular keywords to target that you know people are using in their searches.

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