Hello Everyone, Which do you use, or do you even bother and just use exact match? I am running a couple of campaigns, and I have Phrase and Exact Match and I have doubled up on my key words, so "right foot", and [right foot] I get thousands of impressions, which is good because people are seeing you, and I do get a fair rate of clicks, as an example; Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. 1,362 1,050,868 0.13% So the average does look bad, but I am being seen on the keywords that I want. Any suggestions idea? Comments? Thoughts?
I find it useful to approach this in a few different ways. In some campaigns I will use broad match only, usually for small campaigns targeting small geographic areas. Once I have search query data, I then add phrase and exact match for better CTR's. In broader reaching campaigns, I will start out by adding broad, phrase and exact match keywords, then optimize based upon CTR & conversion data. In campaigns that are highly target in a competitive markets, I will use modified broad, phrase & exact match. The key here is to run various match types and then optimize for improved CTR's. Having a lot of impressions and low CTR's will only hurt your campaign long term. The beauty of targeting in AdWords is the ability to show your ads to people that would benefit from interacting with your advertisement, not just everybody. Hope this makes sense!
Thank you. Very interesting, but I wonder why you say that having alot of impressions and a Low click through will only hurt a campaign long term. Surely when you receive alot of impressions, and low click through (as I am getting on a few campaigns) it just means that your Ads or the words in your Ads are not specific enough to the words or phrase that people have searched for. I really wish I could target ads and specific keywords without having to make a million difference campaigns, or ad groups. Also, I also find my automatic placement for networks to be wildly in accutate with the key words.
I made the assumption you were running a search campaign. You can expect a lower click through rate in display, especially if you are using CPM for branding, but you should still be able to optimize for a much higher CTR. If you know your ads are not specific enough than start there. I would also suggest that you do create a million campaigns/ad groups for improved results. As far as automatic placement: Exclude the sites that are not pulling clicks or that are simply irrelevant to your keyword searches. If you find a site in automatic placements that you feel should be doing well but isn't, then try entering a page URL with-in the website that is relevant. You should also add websites that are working well into managed placements. You may also want to add specific placements you find relevant, run ads on them and see if your assumption is right or not. One last thing. When viewing placements, click on the "See URL List" to see what pages on network sites provide best response and add these direct links to your managed placements.
I think it's fine to start with broad match keywords to see what people are actually typing in. Once you have enough data, move the good keywords into their own adgroup and just do phrase & exact only.
Thank you AWM, very interesting, I hate the idea of having to create loads of campaigns, but if needs must I will start to break things up and see that I can get. I guess with all the campaigns you can see which is a better setup, and I can target specific countries as well.
Well, I just thought I would report back, while it is/was a pain in the rear to break everything down, it is interesting to see which campaigns are doing better, the newly designed ones do seem to have a "better" click thru rate, now if we could translate this into sales, or at least requests, this is the problem with very specific products, still I think your encouragement has turned the adwords campaigns into better things that I had before.
Converting clicks to sales is definitely the hardest part of any ad campaign. You usually need to offer something compelling, and different/unique, from the competition. If you have the skill, it's worth trying to alternate landing pages to see which ones convert better (Adwords makes A/B testing of ads easy; landing pages are another matter). Are you doing A/B testing with ads as well?
If you are selling individual products through an e-commerce website, try running product listing ads from your Google merchant account, that is, if you have that set-up. I see much higher conversion rates for specific products when using product listings.