UK Search Engine Marketing Blog | B10G

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Tired of rising pay per click costs and looking for a way to lower your cost per click and overall spend whilst maintaining your accounts performance or even improve it, well here is a little tip which I’m quite confident that at least 60% of all Adwords accounts will not be doing but should be.

It is simple and straight forward to do and glaringly obvious that you should be doing this but it is surprising just how many people don’t, just do the following regularly and you will be surprised just how big an improvement you will see in your campaign.

1. Run a search query Adwords report from the 02 May 2007 - present with level of detail: ads, view unit of time: summary, campaigns and ad groups: all campaigns and their ad groups, select add/remove columns and only check the boxes search query, click through rate and conversions and then create the report.
2. Export this report into an excel spreadsheet and order the spreadsheet by conversions, keywords with conversions can be deleted, then order the spreadsheet by click through rate.
3. You will now be left with all of the search terms for which your ad has displayed, analyse all keywords with a 0% or very low click through rate (this may take a while depending on the size of your campaign).
4. As you go through (depending on your keyword matching) you will notice obscure search terms, search terms which are not relevant to your product and even search terms which could have negative connotations if associated with your brand.
5. Create a list of terms from this that you do not want your ad appearing for, think to yourself and be brutally honest if you searched for the same term would you click on your ad? is your ad relevant? or better still ask a friend if the search term matches what you offer because it is so easy to blinkered when it comes to your business.
6. From this new list you need to decide on a keyword basis which type of negative keyword matching each keyword/phrase should use; as a negative broad keyword performs differently to a negative exact match, once you have decided and created your list you then need to apply these to all relevant campaigns.
7. Depending on how many impressions your campaigns are accruing, is dependent upon how often you would repeat this process - you would repeat this with the date range set from when you last performed this task to present. Large campaigns with a high budget I would recommend initially doing this weekly and then move onto monthly as the amount of negative keywords you are finding decreases, whereas a smaller campaign I would suggest only repeating this monthly initially then bi-monthly.

By carrying this out on a regular basis will reduce your cost per click - your ads will have less impressions (impressions which you never needed in the first place), which will increase your click through rates, which makes Google think your ads are more relevant to the search terms that they are appearing for which in-turn you are rewarded with a cheaper cost per click and better ad positions,

The effect that this can have is quite remarkable especially on large campaigns (it could literally save you thousands)… give it a try if you are not already doing this!

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