Hi, I spend a significant amount of money every month on adwords ads and I am of course always looking for ways to be more efficient. I keep hearing about companies that have huge numbers of keywords (one company had over 1 million) in order to cut their adwords costs. I don't understand how this would benefit me. My scenario is this: We have two basic sets of keywords. We set adwords on broadmatch with some negative filtering. My understanding is that by doing this we will have our ad shown every time someone enters in a search string that has our keywords anywhere in the string. My competitors also do the same thing. This being the case, what would be the point of figuring out all the permutations of search strings that people use and making them keywords if I already get the traffic??? What am I missing here???
Broad match usually leads to low CTR's (especially on one and two word phrases). It's better to have 500 keywords on exact and phrase match with good ad copy than it is 50 keywords on broad match.
You can now get a report based on what search terms people were looking for when they hit your broad match. If a keyword's working well, add it in as exact match, if it's terrible, add it as negative match, and if it's got low traffic, leave it as it is...
Hi, What you are missing is that broad match is much broader than most people think. It is not only about strings inbetween and different word order. Broad match means that Google will also show your ad for synonyms and anything they feel like is somehow related to your keyword. I am not exaggerating - I had to learn it the the hard way. You only find out by checking your webserver logs or using a tracking tool. You will find that often your broad match keyword will trigger your ad from keywords that you never would have thought of. This can be good because this way you find keywords that you didn't think of. It can also be bad because you get too many unrelated impressions because Google is far from perfect. One example: I used to advertize an Internet Marketing Product called 'Michael's Traffic Videos'. I used exactly this 3 word term broad match only to find that my ad was also showing for the keyword 'circular driving videos'. Google assumed 'traffic' relates to 'driving' - they didn't know that web traffic is not related to racing! My advise: Only use broad match in the beginning of a campaign to narrow down your keyword list and get some new keywords from your server logs. Then eliminate broad match and create tightly focussed ad groups with only phrase and exact match and as copy which closely matches those keywords.
Absolutely agree about the synonyms, but my point still stands - you can still see which keywords are and are not working, based on what people are actually searching for. Once you identify the 'rogue' broad-matches, you can negative match them, and still get the functionality of the broad-match...
This is becoming clearer to me. I could definitely save money by ridding myself of the irrelevant matches that are currently getting served up by adwords. It would also increase my ctr, thus possibly lowering my cpc. Nice