Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

I’m from Illinois, so I’m pretty partial to Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday is February 12th. Old Abe once said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.” If ever a quote from President Lincoln could be applied to PPC advertising, this one is it.

Preparation is one of the cornerstones of successful PPC advertising. The effort you put into researching keywords, building the account structure and writing ads is as important as ongoing care and maintenance of the account.

The account managers at JumpFly spend time with the client before they ever do a thing for them, going through the account goals, discussing metrics and explaining the process of what we do. I think many new clients are surprised at the amount of work that we do before an account or new campaign is ever built, but I think they are pleasantly surprised to hear that we’re not going to slap a dozen or so keywords into one AdGroup and call it a day.

It may take us a good three or four days of in-depth keyword research to find a solid list of viable key terms for a client. That list includes all variations of search terms, including plurals and word order. It’s categorized into AdGroups, so like terms are together, and a comprehensive list of negative terms are also included. We then send that list off to the client for approval before we start building their new account or new campaigns. This ensures we’re both on the same page as to where the client’s ads will be shown. Once a build starts, how long it will take to go live depends on the number of AdGroups that we need to create and how varied the ads need to be to make sure that each AdGroup is targeted in the best way. We’ve had builds take an hour and we’ve had builds take days.

The bottom line is that we don’t hurry the process – we’d rather spend time “sharpening the ax” so we do it right and give our clients the best possible service right from the start.

More about Nikki

It is important to understand Google’s Negative Matching features in order to best refine your searches.

The negative match feature in Google ensures that your ads do not show when the search term entered includes certain keywords or phrases.  For example, one of the most common negative keywords we use is “free”.  If you are selling a new video game, chances are you are not going to want to appear when a user types in “free video games”.  In order to guarantee that you don’t show up for that phrase, you should include “free” as a negative keyword.

Similar to Google’s regular match types, you can include a negative keyword and select a match type of negative broad, negative exact or negative phrase.  With proper PPC Management extremely important to understand these match types so that you do not accidentally prevent your ads from showing on important keywords.

Negative Exact Match
When you select negative exact match, your ad will not show if the search term matches this keyword phrase exactly.  Nothing before, after or in the middle.

This match type is particularly useful if a subset of your important keyword phrase would not be appropriate.

With the video game example, we may decide to include the keyword phrase video game in our campaign, but we might add “video” as a negative exact match so that we do not show up for any searches on just the word “video”.

Negative Phrase Match
When you select negative phrase match, your ad will not show if the search term contains the keyword phrase in the proper order.

For example, if you have a negative phrase match keyword of “video camera” and a user enters the search term of “buy a video camera”, your ad will not show.  However, if they enter “camera with video”, your ad could show.

Negative Broad Match
When you select negative broad match, your ad will not show if the search term matches or contains the keyword phrase in any order and if the search term is a synonym or considered relevant to the phrase.

This, of course, is very vague and negative broad match should be use very, very carefully.

When we use broad match on a keyword phrase, we run the risk of showing our ad on a search term that is not really relevant, despite what the Google algorithm thinks.  But we are able to see the actual results in the search query report and make adjustments to the account.

However, when we use negative broad match, we run the much higher risk of our ad NOT showing for a search term that really would have been relevant.

And I never want my clients to be “missing” when their potential customers are looking for them!

Learn how to use these match types properly to make sure your ads are showing at the right time and not showing when they would be irrelevant.

Multiple campaigns are a great tool that Google, Yahoo and MSN all offer. They work really well for large clients or even small clients who are advertising on super competitive or generic keywords. Multiple campaigns allow you to control your ad spend, isolate high-cost, high-traffic search terms or to test. Here’s a couple of times where multiple campaigns are a great idea to put in your PPC Management repertoire:

1. You have a large number of products to sell: separating different product lines into different campaigns makes it easier to manage and see how well that line is doing. Having a large number of AdGroups selling widely different things can cloud how well or poorly certain lines are doing.
2. You have a large number of products to sell with very different ROI: breaking products into different campaigns lets you control your budget better. I can break out campaigns based on their ROI, so if a certain product or group of products has a much higher ROI than another, I can make sure that more of my PPC budget is concentrated on those products; conversely I may have products that are searched on very frequently, but may have a much lower ROI – I can spend less on them.
3. You have one keyword that’s “hogging” all the money: putting a very general keyword which gets a lot of searches, spends a lot of money and (hopefully) converts for you into its own campaign lets you control its spend, prevents it from hogging all the money and quickly see how well it’s doing. While most of the time general keywords aren’t that cost effective, there are exceptions, and putting those exceptions in a campaign by themselves, where they don’t affect your other search terms and you can control the spend, is a good idea.
4. You want to test a term: Google’s broad match really isn’t that broad, it’s expanded match, which means Google can show your ad on anything they deem relevant. For example, you’re an apple seller and all you sell is apples. Google looks at your keywords, decides an apple is a fruit and shows your ad on searches for orange, oranges, etc. We’ve found that sometimes broad match terms are good, and sometimes they are very, very bad, and you really don’t know until you try. Testing a broad match term in its own campaign (with a lower bid than your phrase or exact match terms) is a good way to test, especially if that term is very generic, like the term “balloons,” or “stuffed animal.”
5. You advertise certain words seasonally: it’s much easier and faster to turn an entire Campaign off or on, than it is to pick and chose AdGroups if you only advertise certain words seasonally, like for the summer, back to school or Christmas.

There’s other reasons why multiple campaigns can be a good idea, but you get the idea. Multiple campaigns can help you make better decisions, test what works without affecting the rest of your search terms, and have a greater sense of control over your PPC advertising.

For more Google Tips, check out Google AdWords Seminars.