Keyword Discovery Trick
Let’s say that you targeted a specific keyword, but you are not making money on it.
Let’s say it’s “laptop”.
Of course there are MANY things you could do that I’m not going to talk about in this post, like changing advert, position, match type, geolocation, etc…
Let’s talk about finding ALTERNATE keywords.
You probably know that if you bid on [laptop] (exact match) you’ll get searches of people that only search that keyword. So if they search “laptop” they’ll see your ad, if they search “cheap laptop” they won’t.
Let’s assume that you are sure that “laptop” is your niche, but you are losing money.
Maybe you should not target the main keyword, but alternate keywords related to it. What’s the best way to discover those keywords? Simply to let Google do it for you.
You could just bid on the keyword laptop with broad match, however you’ll be still be receiving many clicks for “laptop” that will lose you money.
So what you can do is bid on “laptop” broad match, and then bid on “laptop” exact match as negative.
It’ll look like that in the account:
laptop
-[laptop]
Now you’ll get clicks related to “laptop”, but that are not “laptop”.
Of course you need some web analytics software to track the new keywords you receive.
thanks for the great article, very helpful
Thanks..please keep up your blog posts. They are so helpful to me. You don’t know how much.
Great Post! You make a good point which most Newbie PPC Marketers probably overlook. Negative exact matching on a very general, expensive keyword and at the same time discover and manage NEW Search Queries (ie Keywords) that generate paid clicks to your site through broad matching on that expensive keyword.
Nice tip! Thanks!
It’s a nice trick, but bear in mind your ad would still display for terms like “free laptop” which might not be so effective.
@Jonathan
I never said this was about being effective - as the title of this post said it’s a Keyword Discovery Trick.
It’s up to you later on to put as negatives keywords the ones that don’t work.
By the way if you don’t want to show for “free laptop” and want to push this discovery process even further you can do this:
laptop
-”laptop”
By using phrase negative you’ll only get broad matches that don’t contain laptop
Jonathan,
Love PPC Hacking! Does negative matching exact on broad work on Yahoo? (neg match standard on advanced?)
I don’t know unfortunately I don’t use Yahoo at all. Would be interesting to hear from someone using Yahoo.
great article!
if you dont have analytics software, you could use a search quesry report in google adwords to track the new keywords
you’re killing with your ppc skill dude
Thanks for this handy tip - I was wondering if anyone has ideas about arbitrage opportunities?
Thanks,
VT