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Monday, July 23, 2007



Fine Tuning Your Paid Search Account with Negative Keywords

There is a fine line between running ads for enough keywords in your paid search account to generate sufficient traffic and running so many that you generate junk traffic. Unless you only use exact match (or the equivalent). But there are so many variations of keywords or themes that if you only run exact match ads, you are likely to miss a lot of relevant traffic. But there is another way to fine tune the traffic your ad draws without missing relevant searches.

It's done by using negative keywords.

Negative keywords are keywords you specify that should not be included in search queries that trigger your ad. A common example is the word "free". If you sell a product but you do not want ads for your product being displayed to those looking for something free, then you could set a negative keyword of "free" to prevent it.

For example, let's say you sell an ebook about dog training. You might run paid search ads for search phrases like "dog training", "how to train a dog", "dog training information", etc. But if you don't want your ad to be displayed for a search of "free dog training information", then you would set a negative keyword of "free".

You can probably think of some negative keywords at the start that make sense, but as you run your campaign, it really helps to know what keywords people are actually using that trigger your ad at inappropriate times. In Google, you can generate a search query report that will show you exactly what phrases have triggered clicks to your site. As you look through the report, if you see keywords that are not appropriate, then those are keywords that you should add to your account as negative keywords.

Using negative keywords is a way for you to fine-tune the traffic that you drive to your web site via paid search without limiting yourself by using exact match ads. It is a strategy we definitely recommend you look into.

If you need help fine tuning your paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 8:05 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, June 13, 2007



Fine Tuning Your Google AdWords Keywords with the Search Query Performance Report

We are running a large campaign for a software company that sales design-related products. A lot of our time thus far on the project has been devoted to ad group "expansion" (that is, expanding the number of keywords and ads in each ad group). It is a multi-stage project, and the first stage is basically to start generating as much traffic as possible, and then later stages will be devoted to improving the quality of the traffic and increasing conversions.

We've been working on the project for a few weeks, and have begun generating a fair amount of traffic. So we decided it was time to take a look at the search traffic that was generating clicks and see what it looked like. We did this by generating a Search Query Performance Report from the AdWords Reports tab. The results were very enlightening.

What we discovered was that we were getting lots of traffic from completely irrelevant searches. We are using broad match, in order to maximize ad impressions, but we discovered that our ads are being triggered by way too many searches that are unrelated to the products we're selling. Despite ad copy that clearly states the nature of our client's business and its products, people are still clicking on the ads even if it is not relevant to what they are looking for.

The solution is to add negative keywords to the ad groups to prevent our ad from being displayed by all of the irrelevant searches. After generating the Search Query Performance report (with the data divided up by ad group), we pulled out bad search terms that had triggered clicks and added those as negative keywords to the proper ad groups. As a result, we should greatly cut down on the number of irrelevant impressions and clicks, which should result in improvement in our conversion rate. And that's the ultimate goal.

So the negative for us is that now we're going to have to do more keyword research to try and generate as much traffic as we can. But we're pretty sure our client will be happy at the prospect of paying much less for conversions. After we add another round of keywords, we'll have to repeat the whole process, generating reports to look for irrelevant search terms that are triggering our ads. But that's what it's all about - iterative improvements over time that maximize account performance.

If you would like Work Media to help you manage or improve the performance of your Google AdWords (or other search engine) campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 9:27 AM   0 comments