| If you’ve been struggling to get enough traffic to your site then this eclass may help. Remember, your goal is to get at least 500 good quality clicks on your site every day. One way to do that is to increase the number of relevant key words you are using in your Google Ad Campaign. This eclass will help you to find these key words.
Adding new key words to your Google Ad Campaign When it comes to finding new key words, it’s important that you never stop looking! We’ve added new key words to campaigns where the ebook has been selling well for over 12 months, and seen large increases in traffic – and sales. The earlier in your campaign you can improve your key words, the less money you leave on the table. People often ask me “how many key words should you have in a campaign?”. The answer is – as many as you can get, provided they are relevant and good quality. What that means is that the key words must:
We generally have 100 – 150 key words to sell each ebook, but I know people who use many more than this. I find it becomes a “law of diminishing returns” after a bit. A larger campaign takes more time to manage, so sometimes it becomes a trade off between the extra time and missing out on the occassional sale. There are many ways to find new key words. There are several pieces of software you can buy that will help. We prefer to keep it simple! We have found all of our key words using these four methods: 1. Keyword Discovery Use www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html to find less common key words, or variations on your main key words. To do this, do a search on your top 5-10 key words, and see which other phrases come up under it. Copy the list straight from the keyworddiscovery search, and paste them into Excel. If you paste them using “paste special” (under the edit tab in Excel) and then choose “paste as text” you will remove the hyperlinks. You can then edit them as required (eg by taking out any irrelevant ones) and copy them into your key word list in your Google adwords account. For example, if you do a keyworddiscovery search on the term “skin cancer” here are the results: 16492 skin cancer Now obviously not all of these are relevant to a book of stories from survivors of skin cancer. I would delete out all the irrelevant ones, and paste the rest into the Google ad campaign. I would then do the same thing with the other main key words – melanoma and mole. 2. Searches on existing key words Occasionally we’ll find another major key word – one that we hadn’t thought of before in relation to a topic. This generally comes about as a result of reading an email from a customer, or doing further research into the topic as we develop bonuses, etc. But there is an easier and quicker way to find these key words. You simply do a Google search on each of your top 5-10 key words, and read through every site (free and paid) on the first page of the search results. Note down any word or phrase that you think someone looking for your information may type into a search engine. Once you’re done, you can run them through step 1 above, to find any sub-phrases. Then type them into your Google ad campaign. This process can be time consuming, but also very profitable! 3. Google’s key word tool You can access the Google keyword tool from within your Google Adwords account, and use it to quickly and easily add new keywords to your campaign. Here are the steps to use Google’s Key Word tool: 1. Log into your Google Adwords account and go to the Key Word level of your chosen campaign. 2. Click on “Keyword tool” at the top left hand side of the green table (next to “add keywords”). 3. Type in one of your top performing key words in the adgroup, in order to get related key words. Wait while the suggestions appear. 4. Click on “approximate average search volume” to order the list by search volume. 5. Add the suggested words one at a time by clicking “Add” on the right hand side of the table. Or if you want to add all the key words, you can click “Add All” at the bottom of the table. 6. Repeat the process for your other main key words in your other adgroups. 4. Add plurals and mis-spellings Once you’ve found your new key words, go through them and see if you can create variations. Typical ones are plurals, or different forms of the same word, eg “write report”, “write reports”, “writing report” and “writing reports”. It’s also worth including mis-spellings of uncommon words. We get quite a few sales from ads triggered by “melenoma”! Also recognise that there are cultural differences in spelling. Include both the American and English versions if these are spelled differently, eg “color” and “colour”, “hemoglobin” and “haemoglobin”. Using “phrase matching” You can increase your number of key words by up to 3-fold by doing “phrase matching”. This means that your key words can show in three ways, depending on how you list them in your Google ad campaign: 1. Broad-matched – words with no delimiters. These key words will trigger your ads whenever someone types in a phrase that contains your key words in any order, and with any other key words included. Perry Marshall, in his Definitive Guide to Google Adwords gives this example: The key word used cars (without delimiters) will trigger your ads for all of the following searches:
Now if you are selling used Fords in Sydney Australia, you may not want your ad to show in each of these cases. If you ad does show for each of these, you’ll either get poor quality traffic (because they’re not really interested in your site) or low click through rates, which will increase your cost per click. To prevent this from happening, you need to add “negative key words” (see below). 2. Phrase-matched – words with quote marks around them. These key words will trigger your ads whenever someone types in the words in order, without any other words between them. For example the key word “used cars” (with quote marks) will trigger your ads for all the following searches:
But not for the searches:
3. Exact-matched – words with square brackets around them. These key words will trigger your ads whenever someone types in only the exact phrase, without any other words. So the term [used cars] will only trigger ads when that phrase is typed exactly as is. Here’s how to set up phrase matching: 1. Log into your Google Adwords account and go to the Key Word level of your chosen campaign. 2. Click on “edit key words” at the top of the green table. 3. Copy all of your key words, and then paste them twice back into the key word box. You now have 3 copies of your key words in your key word box. 4. Leave one copy as is (these are your broad-matched key words). On one copy, put quote marks around each key word (these are your phrase-matched key words). On the last copy, put square brackets around your key words (these are your broad-matched key words). Here’s an example of how it might look if you had 7 key words in your campaign:
You now have 21 key words in your campaign! Adding negative key words Negative key words are those which create terms for which you don’t want traffic. For example “free information” or “free info” or even just “free” can be added as negative key words. If we include these negative keywords in the above example our ads won’t show when someone types in “free info about melanoma surgery”. We will therefore get fewer irrelevant impressions, and our click through rate will increase. Here are the steps to add negative keywords to your campaign: a. Log into your Google Adwords account and go to the Ad Groups level. b. You’ll see the number of negative keywords you have under the campaign name and daily budget. Click “View / edit” to add some more. If you don’t have any negative keywords yet, click “add”. Note: If you are having problems identifying negative key words, Google has this user-friendly tutorial…
Separating your key words into Ad Groups Note: This was covered in detail in eclass #5. The notes below are a quick refresher. If you haven’t set up separate ad groups before I suggest you go back and re-read eclass #5 first. Once you have a list of key words, it’s important to separate them into several ad groups, with all the similar terms together. The reason for this is that you can then write much more targetted ads, which get a better click through rate and a lower cost per click. Important: Make sure you don’t have the same key word in more than one ad group. If you do this you’ll end up with your ad competing with itself, pushing up the cost per click and diluting the number of clicks you get. Here’s an example of how to create a number of ad groups. With our skin cancer advice ad campaign, we have several terms with the word “melanoma”, several terms with the word “skin cancer” and several terms with the word “mole”. Each of these needs to be put into a separate ad group. Once that’s done, new ads need to be written which include the key word for that group. Here’s an example: Let’s say these are our existing key words, and that they are all in one ad group for our skin cancer advice campaign: melanoma You can see that there is a mix of keywords here. Some terms include the word “melanoma”, some include “skin cancer” and some include “mole”.We get lower click prices / higher average position if we separate these terms into three categories, and write new ads for each of these. So we would sort the list like this:
We then need to write new ads for each of these ad groups, which include the relevant key words in the headline and / or the text. This will also increase your click through rate, as the keywords searched appear bolded in your ad, so they stand out more. Monitoring performance Once you’ve set up your key words and divided them into ad groups, it’s important to monitor their performance – that means both their click through rate and their conversion rate. Here’s how we do it: First we delete the obvious non-performers – those key words that have never had a click or made a sale. Here is how to identify and delete non-performing words: a. Log into your Google Adwords account and go to the Key Word level of your chosen campaign. b. Select “all time” for the date range. c. Click on the “key words” tab at the top right hand side of the green table. d. Sort the key words according to the number of clicks they have had all time, by clicking on the heading “clicks” (note – this may be your default, so you may not see a change when you do this). e. Find the keywords which have never had a click. If your campaign has been running for over 3 months, it’s unlikely that these words will ever result in a click, so delete them by selecting them using the check box on the left hand side, and clicking “delete” at the top left hand side of the green table. f. Repeat the process, this time sorting for conversion rate by clicking on that heading. If you have key words that have received over, say 300 clicks, but have never made a sale, then they are closing at less than 0.33%. If the rest of your campaign has been closing around 1%, then you should consider deleting these non-performing key words, as they are not resulting in sales. But there are also the less obvious poor performers. Once you’ve had at least 1000 impressions, and / or 300 clicks on a key word you generally have enough information to make a decision about whether it’s worth keeping. These are the results and actions we take: 1. Click through rate less than 0.5% after 1000 impressions:
2. Cost per conversion not profitable after 200 clicks:
After applying this eclass you should have a finely-tuned, well-performing Google Ad campaign. |
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Catherine Smibert Toomey
Giving a Voice to the Voiceless
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