“Trimming the Fat” In Your Adwords Campaign
When we get a new Adwords campaign, one of the first things we do is trim the waste. We scan through keywords and identify the ones that don’t generate traffic, or equally damaging, the ones that bring in bad traffic. By cutting these out, we can ensure our clients’ ads are getting in front of the right eyes.
Depending on how a campaign had been managed prior to our taking over, the bad keywords may be subtle or extremely obvious. Below is a list of some peculiar keywords we’ve found showing up on campaigns. These come up as a result of poorly managed broad-matched keywords where Google places your adds on variations of keywords you’ve chosen. As you’ll see, those variations aren’t always so great:
- Live rock concerts: That’s a pretty great keyword to show up for if you’re selling concert tickets, running a music venue, or even working somewhere in the music industry. It’s less valuable when you’re selling live rock for aquariums (Coral and rock that supports living organisms.)
- One client sells pottery by an artist with the last name Campbell – not to be confused with a Campbell’s Soup Mug, which showed up as a broad matched term.
- Cruise Control: Not ideal when your business is booking New York City party cruises.
- And last but not least, a business selling dance apparel and accessories for ballet and jazz dancers (Think Leotards and leg warmers) has no business displaying ads for the search term “stripper dance clothes” (Think…well, you get the idea).
Broad Modify Matching
As silly as many of these keywords are, it’s actually very easy to let your campaign run wild when you set it and forget it. There’s a lot of value in broad matching keywords, and we frequently find a lot of unforeseen opportunities in our broad-match findings. The only caveat is that you need to keep a constant eye on the results.
An expert can identify promising keywords and sort out unsuccessful ones. By implementing broad modify matching, you can refine the direction you want your keyword matching to take by adding positive and negative attributes to variations of your keywords. This provides you with the ability to explore opportunities presented by broad matching while avoiding search terms that are sure to fail.
PPC is an Ongoing Project
Negative keywords aren’t always so easy to identify. Sometimes it’s only through advanced research that you can identify what keywords are “Buying keywords” and which ones are more typically associated with browsing, or unrelated products. Too often, we come across businesses that try the “Set it and forget it” approach to their PPC campaigns. But paid search is not that kind of project. Constantly analyzing, testing, and adjusting ad campaigns is the only way to ensure you’re putting in optimal efforts. Keywords like “employment”, “review” or “DIY” are frequently included in search terms that are in no way focused on making a conversion.
Adwords Management by Intuitsolutions
If you’re worried you’re not getting everything you can out of your PPC campaign, or you’re eager to get a fresh account started with Adwords, give us a call right away gain the advantage of an expert eye! Call 866-590-4650 and get started.
