Eastline Marketing

By Marc Dfouni

#1: Avoid Broad-Matched Sponsored KeyWords

Be careful when using broad-matched sponsored keywords in your AdWords account. Ads are usually directed by Google to display from unrelated keywords or phrases. When your ad shows for a wrong search query, this will cost you money on two aspects.

Your ad will not get as many clicks which will decrease your Click- Through-Rate (CTR) for that specific keyword and pull down the general average of your whole AdGroup. Low CTR results mean low Quality Score which would prompt Google to impose a higher fee from you to your keyword enabled. The Quality Score will also impact Google’s fee. If there’s someone else with the same keyword but better Quality Score, then they’ll be paying less than you, though both of you have the same attributes in terms of keywords and content.

The second form of loss or wasted resources would be in the clicks you get from irrelevant keywords, which have a lower tendency to convert into leads. This costs you clicks from Google that fail to get sales at the average ratio of click/client acquisition. Instead of managing to get 2% of your daily clicks as sales, you’ll have more clicks with lesser sales, which increases the click margin but keeps the sales ratio the same at 2% therefore the general sales aspect will look weak.

Avoiding this problem

Phrase-matched and exact-matched keywords should be the starting point of your campaign. This method will secure you a safer process as you have more control over the appearance of your ads. When you feel you can’t get enough paid click traffic, but still have funds in the budget for further work, then inject some broad-matched keywords back in but stay sharp on monitoring the actual search term used through your web analytics tool and make sure you use Hint #2 to filter out irrelevant keyword phrases.

You should also shave off underperforming keywords from your campaigns. Words that have low CTR or poor conversion rates could be filtered and improved through setting up a data range and studying their position on the keywords lists on CTR and Conversions.

#2: Use Negative Keywords to Your Advantage

Broad-matching words are a double-edged sword. Knowing the negative influence will allow you to further understand the possible positivity. Use it to fend off unwanted appearances of your advertisement. If combined with broad-matching keywords, negative keywords become a powerful tool in your campaign to prevent your ads from showing where they shouldn’t.

A good way to identify negative keywords is through a good web analytics tool which will give you the info for any given click, the keyword that you sponsored and the actual keyword that the searcher typed.

Google Analytics is limited in this aspect as this procedure is a foreign solution; Google will only tell you the words matched on people’s searches and not the keyword they searched. Google AdWords also does not offer this service though there are word filters you could add that could provide the missing info or use another web analytics application that could fill in the loopholes.

Bottom line: It’s worth it to build your negative keywords lists.

#3: Don’t Let Your Competitors Click Your Ads

One of the sneaky ways for competitors to make things difficult for each other would be clicking on each others’ ads to drive up traffic and therefore increase the click prices. Simply, tell Google to stop showing your ads on their computers.

Go to the Campaign Management Tab and click tools. Choose IP Exclusion, where you can select up to 20 IP addresses to block from seeing your ads on their searches.

Want to know which IP to block? Type the most popular keywords into AdWords and you’ll find the top advertisers. All fair in competition, they are people who have also invested money in overshadowing your ads whenever possible. Take down the URL addresses and enter them into Google’s “domain to IP”. You will get the IP of the sites for free. Copy and paste them into the IP Exclusion window and you’re done.

To be safer, even if you don’t see your top competitors on AdWords, block them anyway, they might have already blocked you!

#4: Prevent Your Ads from Showing on Unwanted Content Network Sites

Controversy has raged over whether or not to allow your ad to show on Content Network as well as the search results. Content Network is enabled by default by Google for your advertisement. You might also feel that the quality of clicks from Content Network is generally lower than in the Search Network.

You could entirely turn off the Content Network option through un-checking its box in the Campaign Settings. This could also seriously lower the number of clicks you get which would result in lower leads and sales.

But recently, Google has introduced a solution that addresses this issue indirectly. Under the Campaign Management tab, click on Tools and then click Site Category Exclusion. Choose each campaign from the drop-down box and click on the Topics Tab. You will be shown certain website topics that maybe appropriate or inappropriate for your ads to show. You will also be given data impressions, clicks and cost to analyze if it would be a burden on your campaign or not.

The Page Types tab gives you the results of Error Pages, Parked Domains, and a variety of user-generated content sites and social networks. You can easily select and unselect through checking the appropriate boxes to choose or exclude suspicious or under-performing sites from your Content Network record. While this won’t solve the issue directly, it’s an easy method to minimize any possible negative effect.

In Summary

The four tips will not get you more traffic to your website unless you’ve been able to deal with the Content Network issue and applied Hint 4. Each of these tips will reduce expenses on your click budget and if properly handled, you will get better quality clicks while remaining on budget, which would mean improving your organization’s bottom line.

Through meticulous and well-studied online marketing planning, Eastline Marketing has long excelled in this field as it gives extra care to every client’s needs in terms of their website’s performance, the client’s present competition, online presence, and all that could be done to push our client’s name even higher in rankings and hits.