A Whirlwind Guide

• Without doubt the biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.
• Using broad match only
• The unholiest of the trinity – not tracking results.#1 The Single AdgroupAlthough at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons.First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. Yes, you get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:
• The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords (which are the mindset of your prospects) and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.
• The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.
• The ability to keep tight control over the budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but the granularity and control is not there and the problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.

Have you ever had your account slowed? It’s a pain for sure but the more keywords you have administered in a less than disciplined way, the more of your keywords will be put on hold/in-trial and/or disabled.

Remember Google rewards good advertising performance and looks at all advertiser histories & your advertising history when determining how well you are doing.

Adwords is not a fire and forget medium (unless you have a very niche market with very little competition – but the days of such markets are numbered).

Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return on your investment.

#2 Using Broad Match

Consider the keyword ‘widget’.

How many ways can you search for this keyword? In theory there are infinite number of searches that can be conducted but in practice there are considerably fewer thankfully.

However, how should you specify your matching options within Adwords?

Option 1: Broad Match

This specifies the keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list like so:
Blue widget

What this means is that should somebody search for the keywords:

• Blue widget
• Red blue widget
• Widget blue
• Widget who searches for these things blue?
• Don’t need blue widget

Then, your advert would show for all of these. This is all very well when broad match (I’ll not talk about expanded match searching for fear of confusion!) shows your advert for terms relevant to you. But…

For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilise broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).

The upshot of this is two-fold: