Avoid Losing Traffic By Discovering Negative Keyword Conflicts in Google AdWords
If you’ve been wondering if any of the negative keywords you’ve been adding to your AdWords campaigns are preventing your actual keywords from showing up, you are in luck. AdWords just released a new tool that points out negative keyword conflicts as you navigate your campaign management page in AdWords. This is a great feature that can help prevent traffic losses if you happened to mistakenly negative out an important keyword.
If you do have negative keywords that are blocking your keywords, you’ll see a message such as this one:
If you click on the View link from within the message, you’ll get a full list of the offending negatives as well as the option to delete them. Of course, it’s possible that you added a negative keyword after finding out that a certain phrase did not work for you, in which case you might just want to delete the actual keyword from your campaign, rather than deleting the negative.
Bing Ads (previously adCenter) has had this feature for some time now, so it’s good to see that AdWords has added it too.
AdWords Releases Advanced Phrase and Exact Match
April 23, 2012 by kristina · Leave a Comment
AdWords recently released improvements to their advanced matching options, slightly expanding phrase and exact match, so that users that are typing in misspellings and very close variations of your chosen keywords will still see your ads. This change will help boost traffic on phrase and exact keywords without bringing in irrelevant queries like broad match tends to generate.
A lot of advertisers have been vary of broad match, because of the sometimes irrelevant expansions by the system and have chosen to use phrase and exact match instead of broad match altogether.
If you’d like to opt out of this new feature, you can do so in your campaign settings page, where you will now see a new section Keywords matching options. There. you’ll be able to select your preferences to include or prevent close variants.
I still recommend checking your search query reports to ensure you are utilizing the match options effectively and excluding those irrelevant queries.
adCenter Launches Advanced Negative Match & Negative Keyword Conflicts
November 18, 2011 by kristina · Leave a Comment
Microsoft adCenter just lauched advanced negative match, a feature AdWords has had for a long time now, to help advertisers better prequalify traffic. Now you can set Phrase and Exact Match negative keywords in your adCenter campaigns for even greater precision in filtering unwanted search traffic. Previously, adCenter only allowed Negative Broad. For more information about negative keywords as well as how to use them, please see this post on negative keyword best practices.
Another new feature you may want to check out is their insights into keyword conflicts. Use the new Negative Keyword Conflicts report to learn if you have set any negative keywords that are same as your actual keywords. The report can help resolve any conflicts and help improve performance. It can also helo explain why some of your perfectly relevant keywords have not been getting any impressions.
Save Time By Taking Advantage Of Automated Rules in AdWords
June 11, 2011 by kristina · Leave a Comment
Do you keep checking on your keywords and adjusting bids to make sure they’re showing in top position? Do you run time sensitive seasonal promotions that your ads need to reflect? Do you keep checking conversions and ROI and lowering budget on campaigns that are under-performing? Then you’ll love ‘Automated Rules’ in AdWords. With automated rules you can make changes to campaigns, ad groups, bids, statuses, ads, and keywords based on your custom requirements. You’ll save yourself time and optimize your account based on your unique goals.
Setting up automated rules is easy. In your AdWords campaign management tab, click to ‘Automate’ as shown in the screenshot below and select what aspects of your campaigns you would like to create a rule for.
Next, you’ll want to specify your criteria, such as what the rule will apply to, action, requirements for the rule to take effect, and frequency or when the rule should start running. In the example below, I chose to lower budget by 40% on all campaigns where cost/conversion went above $32. You can select how often you want this rule to run and receive an email with details. Happy automating!
Microsoft’s adCenter Expands Negative Keyword Limits
October 26, 2010 by kristina · 2 Comments
adCenter recently increased their negative keyword limits to ‘thousands.’ This is great news for those who have been optimizing their campaigns in preparation for the Yahoo search marketing and adCenter merger. Previously, advertisers were able to only add less than a 150 negative keywords. To start taking advantage of the new system capability, go to your campaign or ad group settings and add new exclusions.
Unfortunately, unlike with AdWords, in adCenter negative keywords still cannot be assigned a match type. If you’re curious about when you might want to assign different match types to your negatives, and want to read more about negative keywords, see my post on negative keyword best practices.
Google’s keyword tool out of beta
September 25, 2010 by kristina · 3 Comments
Google’s updated keyword tool is now officially out of beta, and advertisers no longer have the option to go back to the previous version of the tool. This is unfortunate, as the previous version provided more results and keyword variations. However, a couple of advantages on the updated tool include updated statistics and the ability to use the tool without signing in.
In you’re looking for additional or alternative keyword tools, I recommend you check out keywordspy and wordtracker. Both require subscriptions but do offer free trials.
Should you let AdWords do the bidding for you with Enhanced CPC?
August 25, 2010 by kristina · 8 Comments
AdWords recently released a new bidding option under campaign settings called Enhanced CPC that uses your conversion data to optimize bids for ROI. Advertisers will reportedly benefit from spending less time on managing bids while receiving more conversions at an equal or lower ROI.
The way Enhanced CPC* works is that your keyword bids are automatically adjusted up or down depending on how an individual keyword converts for you. As a result you may pay up to 30% of your set bid. It’s a feature you can enable at the campaign settings page, and it applies to all the ad groups within the chosen campaign. If you’re uncomfortable paying more than your set Max CPC, you should probably not use Enhanced CPC.
Unlike with Conversion Optimizer, the other AdWords advanced ROI bidding option, you do not need 15 conversions in the past 30 days to use this. However, Conversion Optimizers allows you to set specific CPA goals, which Enhanced CPC does not offer. If you are looking to lower CPA significantly, then you might be better off using Conversion Optimizer, which has greater potential to help you improve CPA.
*Do note that if you enable Enhanced CPC you will not be able to make changes to your campaigns through AdWords Editor.
Stop wasting advertising dollars on bad keywords
Before you can analyze and make decisions on individual keywords, make sure you have conversion tracking set-up first in your Google AdWords account. Conversions are specific actions you care about on your website, such as lead submissions, white paper downloads, or most commonly, sales. If you’re not tracking conversions already, enable conversion tracking within your Google Adwords account first. You’ll get a code snippet to be placed on a page that’s usually a confirmation page for a desired action.
Once you’re tracking conversions, review your data regularly and make decisions based on patterns you’re seeing. If a keyword is getting a lot of clicks but few of those clicks are resulting in a conversion, you may want to lower your CPCs or pause that keyword entirely. This will save you $ and allow your PPC budget to be spent on other, more profitable terms. In the example below, I paused a keyword that generated clicks and had a good CTR but resulted in only 1 conversion and a relatively high cost/conversion.
Best practices for using negative keywords
June 26, 2010 by kristina · 76 Comments
Negative keywords are an excellent way to eliminate irrelevant impressions and improve the quality of your PPC traffic. They help boost your CTR, improve quality score, lower your CPCs and increase ROI. Here are my 5 best practices for using negative keywords with Google AdWords:
- Use negative keywords at the campaign level. Negative keywords in Google AdWords can be applied at the ad group or campaign levels. In most cases, you’ll want to use them at the more scalable campaign level to eliminate specific words or phrases from appearing with any on your keyword combinations pertaining to your entire campaign.
- Use the AdWords keyword tool. Look up additional keyword variations for your highest impression generating keywords through the keyword tool. Any searches that are not relevant to your business should be added as negative terms.
- Expand your negatives. Make sure that you expand the negative terms you come up with, adding singulars, plurals, synonyms and any other variations you can think of. The Google AdWords system does not expand the negatives for you. For example, if you’re running on a keyword ‘cosmetic surgery’ and you add a negative keyword ‘pic’ the query ‘cosmetic surgery pics’ still might trigger your ad unless you add ‘pics’ as a negative as well. Add synonyms (photo, photos, picture, pictures, pix) while you’re at it!
- Run search query reports. Search query reports will show you actual queries that led to clicks on your PPC ads. Any queries that do not apply to your website are excellent negative keywords. I recommend running this report once a week.
- Use advanced negative matching options. In addition to negative broad match, you can also use negative phrase and negative exact match. Negative phrase and exact match should be used to restrict specific phrases from triggering your PPC ads, but still preserve and allow your PPC ads to be triggered for some of the words within that phrase. Let’s say you are advertising a cosmetic surgery website, and you’re running on keyword ‘breast enhancement surgery’. Here are some use cases for advanced negative match types with that example in mind:
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