Congratulations, you’ve gone ahead and started your Adwords account, researched your keywords, built your ad groups and your ads are running. You’re getting a lot of impressions and clicks, but you aren’t getting any conversions. Ask yourself are your prospects using search terms that aren’t relevant? How do you know, and what can you do about it?
As you already know, you can manage the keywords in your Google Adwords account by “keyword match type”. In this article I won’t dive into the details but to read more about the Broad, Phrase, and Exact match types, you can read my previous Pay-Per-Click article on the subject.
Often, using broad match keywords in your Adwords account can lead to irrelevant and wasteful clicks to your landing page. If you’re in a particularly competitive market or a niche with expensive keyword bids, it can negatively affect your quality scores and waste your budget.
I’ll create a simple example to show you my point. Let’s say that you are advertising for a company that builds Stamped Concrete Patios. You find that a good prospect for you is someone who is looking for “Patio” on the internet, so you add the keyword “Patio” to your Adwords account using Broad Match and Phrase Match keyword types. Now, if a prospect types in the term “Concrete Patio” they will see your ad.
The problem is, if the prospect searches for “Patio Furniture” they will also see your ad. If they click on the ad, you’ll waste your budget paying for the click. Even if they don’t click on your ad, you’ll have a lower Click-Through Rate (CTR) than you should. You may be surprised at how much money you are wasting in this manner.
So, how do you find out if you have a problem? Once you know there’s a problem, how do you solve it? The solution lies with something called Negative Keywords. Using Negative Keywords in your Adwords account, you can screen out any searches that contain specific words or phrases. As a result, any search containing those words or phrases will NOT trigger your ad.
In the example above if you had the keyword “furniture” in your campaign as a negative keyword, then your ad would not be shown to someone searching on “Patio Furniture”.
Using a a great catalog of negative keywords can save you significant money, increase your CTR, and increase your quality score. Think about the types of words that you don’t want to trigger your ads and add them in as Negative Keywords. For many advertisers, simply adding Negative Keywords like “Free” or “Used” or “Cheap” can eliminate a lot of irrelevant clicks.
No matter how you run your PPC campaigns remember to never let your campaigns run on auto pilot. You need to check them every day and bid on the appropriate keywords. All too often we see clients throw money down the drain with an Adwords campaign hoping that it will run itself. Remember to learn as much as you can about Google Adwords before embarking on your own campaign.
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