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How much time and effort do you put into keyword optimization? If you’re like the majority of advertisers, the answer is probably “not enough”.
While everyone in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising knows that keywords are the basic building blocks of any PPC campaign, the reality is that many people are missing out on a lot of profitable opportunities.
Why?
Because they overlook the vital importance of keyword optimization, rarely going below the surface to study the impact of critical factors, such as:
When you analyze your keywords with these factors in mind and use the insights to increase or decrease your keyword bids accordingly, you’ll be well on your way to having a highly-optimized keyword list.
In this article, we’ll explore keyword optimization in-depth, giving you everything needed to fine-tune your keyword list for more productive, profitable PPC campaigns.
Analyzing the periodic performance of keywords is the most basic method of gauging the efficacy of your current keyword settings. It takes historical performance data and trends into consideration and gives you an idea of how the keywords may perform in the future.
The Report above shows the performance trend for a specific keyword over a set period. You can use these insights to determine:
This analysis will help you to bookmark keywords for performance investigation. Monitor their performance for a certain time and mark them for further analysis.
Learn More: Why Historical Analysis Of Search Keywords Is Essential For Your Success
Change is the only constant in PPC advertising. The Top Movers Analysis focuses on the top positive and negative changes happened in your account and bring them to surface, so you can see how they have affected positive or negative change in regards to your goals, conversions, and return on investment (ROI).
This form of analysis offers several insights:
Based on this analysis positive movers require your attention for bid increase and negative movers should be bookmarked for bid decrease.
Learn More: Why You Should Be Measuring Significant Movers in PPC Advertising
The Most Significant Keywords Analysis works on the concept of Pareto’s Law, asserting that 20% of your keywords contribute to 80% of your total return (i.e. traffic, conversions, and revenue).
With this theory in mind, you can use this type of analysis to identify your top 20%, and then focus your keyword optimization efforts on these terms.
In any PPC campaign, the most significant keywords are those that:
Your campaign performance depends on the most significant keywords and how they move or evolve.
In this chart, you can assess the most significant keywords in a campaign, and decide whether they are worth their cost. You can determine if they are hitting your targets for impressions, clicks, and conversions.
With this analysis, you can refine your campaign spending to nurture the top 20% of your keywords, ensuring you maximize your ROI.
Learn more; How to Visualize the Most Significant Effect in your Google Ads Accounts
You should keep your campaign goals in mind when deciding which metrics you should measure. Typically, advertisers consider the following performance dimensions when conducting keyword optimization:
Regardless of your budget or goals, you should look to choose keywords that have:
In the image above, you can see performance data for the historical performance and current performance of the top 15 keywords in a PPC campaign. This analysis considers several key factors, including:
With this information, advertisers can see the impact of any keyword bid customization and use it as a guide when deciding whether to increase or reduce their current bids.
Learn More: How to Identify Google Ads Bid Increase Candidates
Nobody in PPC advertising wants to increase their wasted spend. However, if you aren’t vigilant with keyword optimization, you may do that by letting problematic keywords burn a hole in your budget.
So, how do you tackle the problem?
Here are a few tips to help you determine keywords for a bid decrease:
When you have 1st place in Ad Rank, you may have the highest CTR, but there’s no guarantee that all those clicks will be from relevant users. As such, you could be wasting money on attracting irrelevant traffic. Try reducing your keyword bids to get an Ad Rank of 2nd or 3rd position. You will sacrifice some clicks, but the overall ROI tends to be better.
Are you generating a high CTR but seeing relatively few conversions? Perhaps it’s time you cut your bid on that specific keyword. Bidding higher will only drive up your costs, and most likely deliver a lower return on advertising spend (ROAS).
By using match types, you can filter out irrelevant clicks, ensuring the users that land on your website are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. This is an excellent, cost-effective approach to keyword optimization.
Learn more: How to Manually Decrease Max CPC Bid By Using Analytics Intelligently
Occasionally, you may be unsure whether you should increase or decrease a keyword bid. In this case, another option is available — you can pause the keyword.
Think about the following factors when deciding whether a keyword should be paused:
Learn More: To Pause, Or Not To Pause
If you’d like to get a drill-down analysis at the keyword level, run the Pause Candidate Report by PPCexpo.
Here is the Overview page of the Report:
This report is segmented, allowing you to compare the performance values of keywords, so you can see which keywords are viable candidates for pausing.
Many advertisers leave a lot on the table because they don’t take their keyword optimization to the next level by researching related search terms. This practice doesn’t take a lot of time, but it can yield significant results.
Use the Google Keyword Planner Tool to find related search terms. When you do, consider the following:
This value is the cost you pay for a single conversion from the keyword. If the keyword cost is equal to or greater than the conversion value, you should stop using the keyword to rank your ad. The ROI is not worth it.
You may have keywords that are very relevant for your target audience. However, due to high competition in your niche, the CPC may also be very high. Look for similar keywords that are also relevant, but with less competition. You’ll see that they have a lower CPC, which is good news for your budget.
When you account for historical performance, trends, search volume, and competition, you can find low-cost related search terms that help you control your campaign costs.
In any campaign, your ads will inevitably attract some clicks from unqualified users. By identifying keywords that attract these users, you can add the terms as negative keywords, effectively filtering out irrelevant clicks. This is a smart keyword optimization tactic that reduces your wasted spend and helps you get more relevant traffic.
Follow these steps to create your negative keywords list:
1. After performing the Top Movers Analysis, make two lists for keywords — one for keywords that deliver positive/progressive results, and one for keywords that indicate downward trends or currently generate negative results.
2. Consider each keyword’s past performance in terms of CTR, clicks, and conversions. Allocate a score to each keyword. This could be a simple 4-point system that relates to the ROI each keyword generates:
3. Compile a list of keywords that contribute to a negative ROI. Set these terms as negative keywords in your campaign.
Remember that negative keywords trigger your ads for irrelevant users. While you may add some that offer little to no ROI, you should take care not to add terms that could attract qualified users. If you do this, you may lose out on potential leads and conversions.
PPCexpo search query performance report helps you to analyze search terms. You can easily determine your new keyword opportunities and negative list by doing this analysis.
If you’ve got plenty of experience setting up Google Ads campaigns, you should probably opt for manual bidding rather than smart bidding. By doing this, you will much more control over your ads and keyword optimization.
Although automatic bidding will optimize your ads depending on your PPC campaign goals, it does mean you will have less control over your budget. With this, you may find you aren’t able to distribute your budget in the most effective way.
Therefore, with time and practice, you’ll have collected more data and knowledge to make a success of manual bidding. Once you take that step, you’ll have better control over your ads and budget.
A Single Keyword Ad Group is a strategy where you set up Ad Groups to target a single keyword or single theme. This feature of Google Ads is particularly useful when you want to target different audiences with different categories of products.
The Single Keyword Ad Group — or SKAG — paves the way for increased ad relevance, which, in turn, leads to improvements in CTR and Quality Score. You’ll soon find the CPC falls on that keyword, which increases your overall ROI.
Learn More: SKAG or Not to SKAG?
In years gone by, it was easy to rank for keywords, as the competition was sparse, and SEO was much more primitive than it is now. Those days are gone, and Google is now a highly sophisticated machine that is intent on serving up the most relevant, helpful results for users.
As advertisers, we can’t afford to throw your budgets away. Even if you have the budget, it doesn’t make sense to sit back and hope the first keywords you choose will eventually deliver results.
By taking the initiative to analyze keyword data, you can derive valuable insights from performance metrics, which is an excellent guide for critical decision-making in PPC advertising.
Keyword optimization should be an integral, ongoing habit that you nurture. Over time, you can refine each keyword on your list to generate the best possible outcome. By keeping your campaign goals front and center, and focusing on ROI, you’ll stay on track to developing a highly effective list of relevant, cost-effective keywords (and negative keywords).
This approach may take time and patience, but it is a strategy that is built for success.
When you’re comfortable with the keywords, check out this blog to discover 20 tricks and five core areas to take your campaign optimization to the next level.
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