So we’ve been running Adwords campaigns for our client first Line IT for a few years now. It took a bit of effort to get them settled down, but they’re now delivering a productive funnel of sales enquiries and we don’t need to change them very much… on the basis of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
What we have been doing, is regularly checking Google Analytics to see which keywords deliver traffic to the site. Analytics gives excellent data on this, particularly if you use a filter to expose the actual keywords searched. Whenever we see a keyword that’s not relevent to the services provided, we make a note and add it to the negative keyword list for the Adgroup or Campaign.
Negative keywords?
Google Analytics allows you to create a list of words that could be related to your paid for keywords, but for you which you don’t want your ads to appear. For example, we sponsor the keyword “broadband providers” for the First Line Telecoms brand. A while back, the ad was fired when someone searched for satellite broadband providers. But First Line doesn’t provide satellite services, so the cost of the click was completely wasted. But by adding ‘satellite’ to the negative keyword list, we can be sure that that won’t happen again.
This is a pretty simple thing to do do routinely, say twice a month, and it’s pretty much all we’ve been doing to our Adwords over the last year. The results have been great:
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| Click to see a bigger image, you’ll see that Click Through Rate has gradually gone up, whilst impressions – as you’d expect, have gradually gone down. |