Internet Marketing: AdWords Keywords Selection and Optimization

The flip side of Google's AdSense campaigns where you place ads delivered by Google on your site (and which we have already examined) is Google's AdWords campaign. Here the advertiser buys ads from Google on a PPC (pay per click) basis where a number of keywords are listed and the advertiser uses these as a campaign by specifying the amount to be paid on each keyword once they are clicked and the total amount to be spent on a campaign in a given month.

          

As explained in the first part of this discussion/course on Google's AdWords product the whole basis of how AdWords works is dependent on the advertiser selecting keywords (which can be single words or phrases) related to the campaign they are running.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords is the backbone of the AdWords methodology and to do this properly you will first need to concentrate on what you product is and what it does. For example, say you're an antiquarian bookseller. You may think of these keywords for your campaign:

Antiquarian Books
Old Books
Rare Used Books
Rare Old Books
Rare Books
Antique Books
Rare Celtic Books
Rare Military Books
Rare History Books
Rare Medicinal Books

Consider these your core keywords. You would now go to a keyword generation site such as Wordtracker or inventory.overture.com where you can generate up to 200 suggested keywords based on each one of your 'seed' keywords. Here's an example of some of the suggestions you might get:

antiquarian books
rare and used book
books
rare books
antiquarian
rare
book
old books
search
travel
author
literature
natural history
first editions
used books
maps
antiquarian collectible book
rare vintage book

Looking at the list above, some of the suggestions are clearly nonsense or too general. But others seem useful and yet others point to things that we originally missed. So, a revised list of keywords might be:

Antiquarian Books
Old Books
Rare Used Books
Rare Old Books
Rare Books
Antique Books
Rare Celtic Books
Rare Military Books
Rare History Books
Rare Medicinal Books
rare and used book
first editions
antiquarian collectible book
rare vintage book
vintage books

As you can see, using the keyword suggestion tools has increased your list with other useful terms that are directly applicable to your business. There are even new keywords initially missed in your original hand-drawn list. What you have now are your 'key' or 'core' search terms. The terms that you want people to use when looking for both your website and your AdSense ads. However, the list of suggestions also reveals some possible keywords that you might not want your users to search with. Examples would be:

Rare Maps
Antiquarian Maps
Antiquarian Map Books
New Books
Bestselling Books

None of these terms are directly linked to your business. But why would you bother generating a list of negative search terms, I hear you ask... This actually has to do with how AdWords keywords work. If you take the search term rare books AdWords actually uses this in what they term broad matching. Essentially any search term containing those words or their plurals will be matched. For examle, all the following search phrases would be matched:

rare books and maps
rare cookery books
rare new books
rare bestselling books

Potentially therefore you could get many spurious matches that would still lead to your ad being displayed and clicked on. To eliminate this possibility use the negation '-' character like this:

-maps
-map
-bestselling
-bestseller
-cookery

Here you have a list of words that you want excluded from your lists of keywords. As a result your keyword list now looks like this:

Antiquarian Books
Old Books
Rare Used Books
Rare Old Books
Rare Books
Antique Books
Rare Celtic Books
Rare Military Books
Rare History Books
Rare Medicinal Books
rare and used book
first editions
antiquarian collectible book
rare vintage book
vintage books
-maps
-map
-bestselling
-bestseller
-cookery

This is good as you have a generalized list of broad match keywords and a list of words that you do not want matched. This both narrows the searches that will reveal your ads to only those you want but it also removes spurious matches and makes your campaign more focussed (and less expensive!).

Other Match Types

Just as you have the standard borad matches and negative matches already discussed above, there are two other very important match types in Google's AdWords campaigns.

Phrase Match

A phrase mach is a match to any search phrase entered that contains your keyword in the exact sequence and form specified by you. In AdWords phrase matches are specified by double quotes. Thus a phrase match for rare books would be specified "rare book". This would match the search phrase rare book dealer but would not match rare cookery book.

Exact Matches

Exact matches are even more restrictive than phrase matches in that your ad is only displayed when the user's search phrase in Google's search engine exactly matches the keyword or phrase you specify. Exact matches are specified by square brackets [rare book] and only matches the phrase rare book it will not match any other phrase even if it contains the words 'rare book'.

All very well, you may say, but what has this to do with me? The trick that most people using AdWords miss is that they're not using exact matches and phrase matches. One reason is that Google rewards you for relevance. If a user's search term exactly matches on of your keyword phrases then your ad title is displayed in bold. Excellent for making it stand out! Also, expanding your terms using exact and phrase matching can lower your click through costs. This strategy also lowers your overall campaign costs by 30% as terms are matched in the order: exact, phrase and then broad matches. Broad matches may hit a number of your keywords triggering payments but exact mathces will only ever hit one keyword.

Also ensure that you have at least 250–300 keywords as, once again, this will lower your overall cost per click and will improve the chance of your ad being displayed which increases your click-through rate.

As a result of these changes your keywords list would now look like:

Antiquarian Books
"Antiquarian Books"
[Antiquarian Books]
Old Books
"Old Books"
[Old Books]
Rare Used Books
"Rare Used Books"
[Rare Used Books]
Rare Old Books
"Rare Old Books"
[Rare Old Books]
Rare Books
"Rare Books"
[Rare Books]
Antique Books
"Antique Books"
[Antique Books]
Rare Celtic Books
"Rare Celtic Books"
[Rare Celtic Books]
Rare Military Books
"Rare Military Books"
[Rare Military Books]
Rare History Books
"Rare History Books"
[Rare History Books]
Rare Medicinal Books
"Rare Medicinal Books"
[Rare Medicinal Books]
rare and used book
"rare and used book"
[rare and used book]
first editions
"first editions"
[first editions]
antiquarian collectible book
"antiquarian collectible book"
[antiquarian collectible book]
rare vintage book
"rare vintage book"
[rare vintage book]
vintage books
"vintage books"
[vintage books]
-maps
-map
-bestselling
-bestseller
-cookery

With all these changes applied you are now ready to upload your keywords list to Google's AdWords page so that you can begin your campaign!