How Many Keywords Should I Have?

Posted onJanuary 31st, 2011 byadmin

How many keywords should I have? This is the question advertisers should consider more. Instead many ask: Where can I find more keywords?

More is better, right? Hell, it’s the American Way.

“If I have more keywords, I can cover more bases when customers do a search for my products. The more I have, the wider that net is and that means I’ll be seen more. Where can I find more keywords?” Tell me if this sounds familiar?

This is a very logical point of view. In fact, it’s not a bad strategy at all when you set limits and don’t spread the keyword mix too thin. That plan will work fine until you’ve gone too far. That’s when things get out of hand.

Here’s the rub. When you have X amount of budget to spend monthly/daily on keyword clicks, X gets distributed throughout all the keywords you bid on. Keywords that don’t have many clicks and impressions don’t have a high population of statistical data. When the distribution is over a vast amount of keywords, a higher percentage of the budget becomes lost to all the many keywords that don’t produce enough volume of clicks. There won’t be sufficient data to make any assessment to whether the keywords are in fact performing greatly, poorly, or even average. That’s when you’re stuck!

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Lower Conversion Costs While Increasing Sales Return

Posted onApril 25th, 2010 byadmin

Lowering Conversion Cost without lowering sales return has always been the advertiser’s dilemma. Increasing return has always been an amazing feat. Advertisers have pushed for the lowest conversion cost. But at the end of the sales day, they paid closer attention to sales volume and return than conversion data. As professional Adwords managers, its expected that we’ll be asked to lower conversion cost for our clients. Now at what cost can we do this? The fastest way to lower conversion cost is to lower CPC and the fastest way to do that is to lower the keywords bids and consequently lower ranking, exposure, traffic, and sales return.

So in our business, the client has passed the dilemma onto us. How are we to manage client expectations with lower conversion costs while increasing the sales revenue?

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Staying Profitable with Adwords Minimum First Page Bid Requirement

Posted onNovember 29th, 2009 byadmin

Keyword Search Pros has had a lot of inquiry to why Google Adwords revenues have changed this year. It is probably no surprise most inquires come in the form of complaints ranging from the new interface change to Google removing the additional Sponsored results on other pages to minimum first page bid requirement.

Though advertisers will typically maneuver around the new interface until they can navigate comfortably, most are not enthusiastically diving into routine account management. The result is less time being spend optimizing these campaigns in a time when it is most critical to do so. With less attention being spent in the advertiser accounts, that bigger problems are likely to go unnoticed.

It has gone without much discussion that Google has made changes that remove the “More Sponsored Listings” link at the bottom of the first page of Google search results. Actually, without the link itself, there is not much difference in the way ads are served (or not served.) How many people really go looking for Sponsored Results on Page 2 anyway? The link missing really serves as an calling that there is a much greater movement taking place in the background. It goes back to an earlier change made last year when we saw “minimum first page bids” for the first time.

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