Jumpstarting a new keyword and advert on AdWords
AdWords being such a complex platform, it’s very hard to determine what’s important for starting.
Should you focus on the advert, on the keywords, on the negatives research, on the right bid amount, etc… ?
But then since all those things are interconnected, it could very well be that when you change the negatives everything else changes.
Negatives is something that might take a lot of time to discover, so what do you do in the meantime?
My suggestion is very simple: start with exact match
Exact match delivers no surprises, you know exactly what search queries you are receiving.
Very likely you cannot do just exact match, as to get big volumes you’ll have to do phrase and broad match too.
So basically what we do is as usual for a given keyword we bid with the 3 matches, exact, broad and phrase at the same time.
In the following example we bid on “cheap laptop”:
- cheap laptop
- “cheap laptop”
- [cheap laptop]
Now for example in order to determine the CTR of our advert for a new keyword we should look only at how it performs under exact match, as we know we’ll have no surprises here.
Over time we’ll discover negatives for phrase and broad and we’ll add them, but since this is a long process in the meantime we can already optimize our advert by looking at the CTR of the exact match.
The reason for this is that if we use broad and we get clicks for words we don’t want (and that later on will become negatives) we may distort the CTR of the advert. For example broad may contain the word “free” and appear to have a bigger CTR than exact, but this only until we put free as a negative. If we start by looking only at the CTR of exact in the beginning we won’t fall in those traps.
Hi Giotto,
this technique is not really new. Booking all threee match-types can be read in many PPC-blogs as a recommended strategy. My question about this now is, how you structure your account then? Do you use different campaigns and adgroups? Do you use one adgroup per keyword-subject (so with several keywords in one adgroup) or one adgroup per keyword-match-type (and this way again several keywords with perhaps several subjects in one adgroup) or one adgroup per keyword per match-type and subject?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Best,
Thomas.
The suggestion of this post is not the fact of bidding on the 3 matches, it’s simply to ONLY look at exact match when trying to improve the CTR of your advert, as it’s a much more solid benchmark compared to broad or phrase since over time you add negatives and you can’t understand if the CTR improvement comes from adding those negatives or improving your advert. With exact match you are 100% sure it’s not from negatives. Your question about how to structure the account is interesting and I’ll write a full post about it next time.
@Thomas
By reading this again I realized I didn’t answer the question you were asking. If you are just starting working on an important keyword put it alone as exact match in an adgroup and experiment several adverts to see which one gets the best CTR. In another adgroup you can bid broad and phrase and research negatives. Later on when you have your negatives you can test the adverts again on that group if you want (they may behave slightly differently than on the exact).
However the important thing to understand is don’t try to optimize both adverts and negatives at the same time and in the same adgroup!
Not sure I totally agree with your strategy as it really depends on the *strategy* of the advertiser. More so you neglect the power of long tail keywords.
Are you after CTR or conversions?
Besides knowing the obvious negatives for your campaign or adgroup, if have setup similar campaigns or adgroups in the past, you would have built a fair number of negative keywords already.
What is the essence of keyword research if you do not also come up with negatives?
If your strategy is that you require quick results and urgently need to get a *feel* of the search marketplace via AdWords, you would want to *open up the taps* a bit with broad & phrase match types to determine converting long tail and short phrased keywords. And then gradually turn off the taps.
If you do however have a *very* limited budget, I would still suggest that you have phrase match work along side exact match key phrases in separate AdGroups in a bid to isolate CTR overlaps and enable better fine tuning.
The tip here is that while you add negatives you should work on optimizing your advert in a different adgroup that only contains the exact match of the main keyword. The reason is that as you add negatives the CTR/Conversion of your advert will change too but you have no idea if it’s because you added negatives or if you are improving the advert properly.
By having an adgroup with only the exact match you know any change in CTR/Conversion is only because of the changes you are making to the advert.
Got it - you are isolating variables in the exact match only adgroups.
Interesting - I am experimenting it on a campaign today.
I’ll let you know how I get along.
Hi Giotto,
Nice post. I actually come across this quite frequently from clients and prospects for WordStream. I see more “advanced” or “expert” PPC Campaign Managers buying the same keyword on all 3 match types. While, I see the utility in buying the same keyword with 3 match types to “Jump Start”an AdWords account in order to isolate & test variables, I think it is important to ween off that strategy as your sample size gets large enough to determine enough negatives, test adverts, test landing pages, etc. Google states that there is NO Quality Score benefit to buying the same keyword and using multiple match types in the AdWords Blog.
As conversions build up for particular keywords, I think those keywords should be exact matched on and in their own adgroup. Another group of keywords that convert well should be phrase matched and broad matched against, in order to discover new queries that are driving traffic and conversions.
Best,
Ryan