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Showing posts with label ppc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ppc. Show all posts

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Bored with Broad Match

Working as a dedicated Pay Per Click manager on a number of varied accounts, from time to time you will come across issues that you haven’t dealt with before and will have to find different solutions to resolve them. Pay per click after all is still an industry in its infancy. My latest frustration has come in the form of matching options, but to be more specific ‘broad match’.

Around our office a discussion has been raging on for the last few weeks. Time and time again, after running search query reports, we are finding obscure search queries matching up to keywords on broad match within the pay per click account. A prime example of this occurred only this morning, where an ad was served under the search term ‘nintendo ds deals’ and was an expanded match from the broad match keyword ‘canada holiday deals’. How the Google algorithm finds a match of relevance between these two terms is beyond me, after all this is Google’s lifeblood - RELEVANCE!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been finding these occurrences more and more often over the different pay per click accounts that I manage. Accordingly, I have been working out solutions to these issues along the road. At first I was using an increased amount of negatives to drill down the possibilities that the keyword could be served for. Now I believe that this may just be a stop gap solution. I’m starting to think that maybe the way forward is to do away with the use of broad match altogether!

The minefield of pay per click is hard to navigate, even for vastly experienced people within the industry. I find new reasons every day why the companies are best to out source this work to the experts who can stay on top of these issues and find solutions to them.

The Negatives You Can’t Live Without

Here at Click Consult, we obviously manage a large number of PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns and carry out a lot of negative keyword research. For those of you who don’t know, negative keywords eliminate searched phrases you don’t want your ad to appear for. A good example would be a 5 star hotel that wouldn’t want its ads to show for “cheap hotel” searches, and so, “cheap” would be added as a negative. Our clients operate across all markets sectors, industries, niches etc; nonetheless there are some negatives that crop up time and time again. Have you got them in your PPC campaign?

• Forum/Forums: If people wanna chat about a product or a service with others online, chances are they won’t be entering their card details any time soon.

• Free: There’s always someone looking for a free lunch. Avoid.

• Second Hand/Used: Pretty self-explanatory, unless you sell reconditioned products.

• Jobs/Job/Vacancy/Vacancies: Whatever the keyword, you can be sure that there is someone looking for a job in it.

• Repairs/Parts/Cleaning/Maintenance: If you sell products on your website, make sure you weed out people looking for related services or accessories (assuming, of course, you don’t offer them).

• Info/Information: These people are at the very start of the buying process. Don’t waste your clicks/money on them.

• Hire/Rent/Rental/Lease: A must if you only ‘sell’ the product in question – for example, wedding dresses, DVDs etc

• Define/Definition/What Is: Unless you want to pay for people who haven’t got a dictionary, make this a negative.

• Manual/Instructions/Guide: If people have lost their instructions or need a little help to work something, you don’t want them clicking on your ads.

• Review/Reviews: These people aren’t looking to buy or enquire – they want to know if something is any good. Avoid these people until they are several notches further along the buying process.

• How/Where: Someone who conducts search that contains the words “how” or “where” is, again, looking for information.