3 Ways to Lower Adwords Conversion Costs with Negative Keywords

Posted onMay 9th, 2011 byadmin

Most advertisers use negative keywords in the most limited fashion. Limitations occur both in the way advertisers retrieve their potential negative keywords, as well as where and how their negative keywords are executed. It’s very common to see advertisers try their luck guessing as to which negatives to use and it’s obvious those advertisers aren’t paying attention to which specific queries people ACTUALLY type into the Google search.

When you, as an advertiser, can discover not only which queries people actually make but also what keywords and ads they trigger, you can take back control over your account and learn how easily people convert under the proper settings.

Negative keywords have other purposes than to simply weed out irrelevant inquiries. Here are 3 simple ways you can increase conversions by using negative keywords. (more…)

Is Your AdWords Account a Hidden Horror?

Posted onApril 28th, 2011 byadmin

Have you ever watched a horror movie and seen a character do something so counter-intuitive it makes your brain explode? The victim walks into a dark basement without a flashlight knowing the killer is in the house. You’re already thinking, “Turn around! Don’t go down there!” But it’s no use, it’s too late. The victim’s fate has been written.

An unmanaged AdWords account is a lot like a B-rated horror flick and every day thousands of business owners walk into their own dark basement. Without a flashlight they are subjecting themselves to the hidden horrors that lurk in the dark. These business owners are allowing themselves to get slaughtered, financially speaking, by setting up Pay Per Click campaigns without understanding Google’s rules.

Pay Per Click is a thousand tiny knives slicing open the throat of your business. A click is a click and they add up fast. This is especially true when you’re paying for clicks regardless of how relevant they are, whether those clicks convert to a sale, or how much your products cost. The results can be savage. Advertisers commonly complain about spending up to $60k on AdWords yet they still can’t make a sale.

When the Keyword Search Pros look inside an unmanaged AdWords account it’s like turning the lights on in that dark basement for the first time. What we find will rattle even the most seasoned bones. (more…)

Cut Wasted Spend with Search Query Reports

Posted onApril 23rd, 2010 byadmin

Cut More than 10% of wasted Google ad spend with Search Query Reports. Search Queries are keywords that visitors have typed into Google. Whenever someone clicks on your website, there is a record of what they typed into Google to do so.

One of the largest misconceptions that advertisers have is that they think people who click on their ad, always type in their “exact” keywords. This is really true only 5-10% of the time. Most of the time, they are searching some different, longer or shorter tail of the exact words. The point is that Google is trying to find relevant matches between what you offer and what people are searching for. The rub is that Google is a computer that doesn’t have the human-like capabilities to understand every single person’s searching intention and match it exactly with what you do. When looking for relevancy between your keywords and keyword searches, there lies irrelevant search queries.

So you grab this record of search queries called a Search Query Report. Once you have this report, you can go through it and look out for potential negative keywords that can be used to qualify for only the relevant search queries. How long would you spend sifting through wasteful keywords if you could save more than 10% of your monthly as spend? An hour? 2 hours? I’m gonna teach you how to do in less than 30 minutes a month.

I’ll tell ya- just about every time we have furnished an advertiser with this sort of analysis, the standard response has been, “I’m paying for that?” And the answer is -Yes.

We’ve written about this before and done a video but never really showed advertisers how easy this really is. Here it is.

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Methods to Keyword Research

Posted onAugust 18th, 2009 byadmin

As an advertising consultant for one of the leading PPC firms, I’m always asked this question, “Where do you get your keywords from?” And since this is such a popular question, I have decided to finally write a post about it once and for all. Because afterall, if it’s something you’re going to do, you should probably do it right from the start.

Before we really jump right in, I want to mention that there are different circumstances between advertisers who are looking to do keyword research for the very first time and those who are looking to add additional keywords to their existing keyword mix. Depending on what resources you have available at the time you do your research, that would dictate how you could go about finding them.

There are actually quite a few ways in which to find keywords. Not all of them will be mentioned here in this article. However, we will mention the most popular ways to research keywords and also give the disclaimers to them as well. There is no perfect way to get the right keywords the first time around. And whatever keywords you do find will have to undergo some tests to make sure it holds true for your account.

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