Hello...I like many here are new to Adwords and must admit over the last week have become somewhat addicted to viewing my CTRs and reading this forum! A new hobby! There's some great info on here... Naturally I have a fair few questions so I'll start with this one...I read on a post yesterday about coming up with a keyword list of say 20, and then adding them in a broad, phrase and exact match format, meaning that you end up with 60 keywords? Is this a common strategy? What are the benefits? Thanks
There is really no benefit to it, a lot of people will tell you that doing this increases your traffic. But the truth is that just by adding the broad version you will be getting maximum exposure for that term and related terms anyway. Here's a little info help you understand a little more about how to use matching correctly. There are 2 methods of building a keyword list. 1) Go broad and then negate undesirable queries later. Generally takes less time but be careful. For example if you run a wedding photography service you can use just a few keywords like "wedding photographers" on broad, this will ensure you encompass every possible search that match up to the keyword but beware you'd also get matched up on a keyphrase like "wedding photo's" (believe me I've done it). To stop your advert taking impressions from undesirables searches (thus lowering CTR because they don't produce many clicks) go through your keyword refferer logs and find out what searches people are using to get to your site, those you know are irrelevant and are unlikely to convert can be added as negative keywords. 2) Use a good keyword tool and use it to get as many variations on "wedding photography" as possible, then choose only those that are likely to convert and place them on exact or phrase match. With this method you'll get a lot less of the irrelevant junk searches adding impressions to your account, but you may miss out on searches the keyword tool did not pickup. Generally I use the second method and occasionally use a broad match temporarily to collect some keyword data and perhaps find something good I missed with the keyword tool. I may also use the broad match method in a small targeted region if search volume is low.
Finding non converting keyword and removing them or adding to negative list is more important It take time to know which keywords converts so use broad match until you know more about profitable keywords.
It is common for a newbie to attempt to use all 3 matches, but in reality you only need the broad and exact match of each keyword type. All the top major agencies in the world also only work with these two match type. You want both exact and broad for every keyword. Long term goal, you really want to match as many queries to exact match as possible so that you can have complete control over position, bid and text ad for every search that comes up The use of broad match is more for keyword discovery. With proper analytic tools you can extract every broad match search sent to your site and then create exact matches of them all so that you can control all your variables. Example You bid on "widget" in the broad match then people search online for online widget buy widget cheap widget Then you can go into your analytics, pull out all the variations and create exact and broad matches of each. If you continue to do this over time, you will have better control over CPC and POS leading to more efficient CPA and budgets, plus if your using googles conversion tracking, you will see more conversions being mapped to more exact matches with less search volume because widget broad might get 100,000 impression, 1,000 clicks and 10 sales but if you follow the above examples eventually the stats will break down to all the long tail terms and the 10 sales will no longer be lump summed under the broad root version of the keyword.
Brilliant. Thanks for that...all makes perfect sense so will feed that strategy into my campaign straight away.
I've started to do the above and have a couple of queries which are bugging me...can you have broad and exact matches for each keyword within the same ad? Or do you have to split them into separate ads? And if you then find that one keyword is performing really well and you want to take that out of ad 1 and put under a more tailored ad (ad 2), will your stats be reset for ad 1 when you remove that keyword, and if so, will this affect the quality score?
It is best to seperate them into their own adgroups, this way the ads can be be targeted to each match type. Usually for Broad match I like to use keyword insert and write a more vague ad, due to the many variations broad match will trigger and exact match is always the same so I like to hard code my message and get more targeted If ad was is not deleted or edited then QS for that ad will remain the same for the remaining keywords withing that adgroup, however the new ad that is created for the keyword that is moved will start with a new QS for the text ad and the QS for the keyword will be carried over.