Player's Guide - Lesson 6

"Adwords Keyword Strategies"

Lesson:[1][2][3][4][5][6] 

 

Today, we will cover two essential keyword strategies - tools that you absolutely must be using if you want your AdWords campaigns to be successful.

Without wasting time, let's dive right into it.

Keyword Matching

Keyword matching refers to the basic AdWords functionality of matching your target keywords to the search queries that users are typing into the search engine every day. If you are targeting that searcher's geographical location (that means that if the searcher is in Jamaica and you are restricting your target market to US, he won't see your ad) and if there is a keyword match, then your ad will be shown for that search (what ad will show, where it will show, what ranking it will have will depend on your settings).

There are four types of keyword matching that AdWords uses - broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. We've seen the first three before, but let's review them once again.

Broad match

This is the default option. When you include keyword phrases – such as tennis shoes – in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order – and possibly along with other terms.

Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches.

You should be careful with broad matches - they bring in a lot of traffic but it's mostly untargeted traffic. With broad matching you must use negative keywords (see negative matching below) to cut off unwanted searches. For example, if you are bidding on website templates you wouldn't want people who are searching for free website templates to come across your ad - even if they click through they are looking for free stuff and thus most definitely will not pay, costing you money for nothing.

Example:

Phrase match

Your ad appears when users search on the exact phrase and also when their search contains additional terms, as long as the keyword phrase is in exactly the same order. A phrase match for "tennis shoes" would include "red tennis shoes" but not "shoes for tennis."

Phrase matches are useful when you want to target exact word combinations, such as "bose speakers" or "california DUI lawyer".

Example:

Exact match

The search query must exactly match your keyword. This means "tennis shoes" will only match a user request for "tennis shoes" and not for "red tennis shoes," even though the second query contains your keyword.

Exact matches are the most specific type of keyword matching - your ad shows only if your keywords exactly match the search.

This cuts down on the number of potential searches you can target, so it's always a good idea to use phrase matching and some broad matching as well.

Example:

Negative match

When you don't want your ad to show for certain keywords, you can put that keyword here. One of the most common negative matches is 'free'. In your keyword research you may also come across a lot of terms that you don't want to target. By entering them as negative matches, you will be able to cut down on wasteful clicks.

Be careful of what you put in as negative keywords though - you might end up cutting off some very valuable keyword searches.

Broad match: keyword as it is
Phrase match: "keyword in quotes"
Exact match: [keyword in brackets]
Negative match: -keyword with trailing minus sign

For more help on keyword matching, watch this Flash tutorial the AdWords help site on keyword matching.

Example:

moving on...

Peel and Stick

As you've learned thus far, one of the most important aspects of profitting with Google Adwords is writing an ad that is specifically targeted to what the visitor is looking for.

If everything was perfect, and we had an infinite amount of time, we would write an individual ad for each and every keyword. But, guess what? Everything isn't perfect, and we most definitely have a finite amount of time each day.

So, what do we do?

You should start off with a small number of ad groups (If you don't remember what a group is, please refer to a previous lesson.) Starting with a small number of ad groups will make things much easier for you to manage AND monitor in the beginning. Monitoring the performance of your keywords is HUGE when you first create an ad via Adwords.

Alright, now in your ad group you should write 2 good ads, 1 slightly different than the other for split testing purposes, and then place several "related" keywords into the group. At this point, don't worry if the ad that you wrote matches EXACTLY with each keyword. It's not possible at this time, because you're placing related keywords into this 1 group to get a good feel for which words will bring you the most traffic.

After some time goes by, you'll notice that some keywords are bringing more traffic to your website that you would have expected. (i.e. getting you more clicks than you would have initially thought).

This is where the "Peel and Stick" method comes in so very handy. These keywords that you notice are getting you more clicks, you'll want to "peel" them and "stick" them into their own ad group.

Why?

Simple... Because if you can write an ad that is specifically written for each of these high performaing keywords, you WILL increase your clickthrough rate (the number of people that click on the ad). Increasing the clickthrough rate will do 2 things:

  1. Get more visitors to your website to see your sales message
  2. Lower the price you're currently paying for each visitor. Remember, Google rewards good advertisers, by lowering the price you'll pay per click, the higher you can get your clickthrough rate. So, obviously, the goal is to get as high of a clickthrough rate as possible.

So, what we've essentially done here is:

  1. Found a few keywords that are sending us a good amount of traffic, but don't have as high of a clickthrough rate as they could.
  2. "Peeled" those keywords from the "generic" ad group we started with.
  3. "Stuck" those keywords into their own ad group
  4. Wrote a killer ad, specifically taylored around these keywords

After doing this, what should happen is...

  1. You'll increase your clickthrough rate
  2. You'll get more visitors to your website
  3. You'll presell your visitor better BEFORE they get to your website, just by viewing your targeted ad
  4. You'll pay less per visitor because of the increased clickthrough rate
  5. You'll increase your Adwords ranking

Now, you tell me... Is this something you should do everytime you start an Adwords campaign? You bet your britches! :-)

Just to make sure you understand, let's do a quick example so I can show you exactly what the "Peel and Stick" method is.

Step 1: We'll take a large group of keywords and plug them into 1 ad group. Our keywords are all somewhat related to home entertainment systems...

Step 2: Over the next few days/weeks we'll track our results, paying close attention to the number of clicks each keyword is getting, as well as the number of clickthroughs each keyword gets.

Step 3: After a few days/weeks go by, we'll start top notice some keywords getting quite a bit more clicks than the others. This is where we peel and stick, IF the original ad wasn't written specifically based on those keywords. Below you'll see a "fake" campaign that I've created to show you an example of what we need to do next...

Keep in mind that there are MANY more keywords listed below the last keyword in the screenshot. I didn't want to take a gigantic screenshot, so just remember there are many more keywords in this group that we've created.

Below you'll see 2 arrows pointing to 2 keywords with a high number of clicks.

Home Theater System got 919 clicks
Surround Sound got 87 clicks

Home Entertainment got 88 clicks, but because the clickthrough rate is so high, and the ad written already targets this keyword well, we'll leave it here and won't "peel" it.

We will, however, "peel" the keywords:

  • Home Theater System
  • Surround Sound

... and we'll place them into their own group. And then write an ad that is written specifically for people entering each of those keywords.

Our new ads would look something like this:

You'll notice that the Headline of each ad contains our main keyword, which Google will bold for us. It's a proven fact that you will increase your clickthrough rate by including your main keywords somewhere in the ad... Usually the headline is the best place. Or you could even include your keyword in both the headline AND the ad like we've done in the ad on the right, above.

Once we've "Stuck" these super performing keywords into their own ad groups, we'll soon notice that our clickthrough rates have risen, accomplishing our goal... which, as I mentioned above is to:

  1. increase your clickthrough rate
  2. get more visitors to your website
  3. presell your visitor better BEFORE they get to your website, just by viewing your targeted ad
  4. pay less per visitor because of the increased clickthrough rate
  5. increase your Adwords ranking
  6. ... and lastly, Make more sales!

The "Peel and Stick" method is one of the most important Adwords techniques you can do to increase your bottom line. Use it wisely and use it often and you'll be 1 step ahead of the other guy that hasn't taken the time to do this... and is probably losing money :-)

By this time, I'm hoping you've taken some sort of action and at least have opened an Adwords account and have started playing around with it a bit.

Also, hopefully you've used Keyword Elite to generate lots of keywords for you, and have found several potentially proftable niches to start promoting.

In the next several lessons I'll be showing you some specific things I do with Keyword Elite and Adwords/Adsense to make money online. Stay tuned. You're going to be glad you did. :-)

All the best,

Brad Callen
PPC Marketer
http://www.keywordelite.com