Daniel’s Internet Marketing and Piano Blog

Adwords Advice January 31, 2009

There are many pitfalls to running an adwords campaign, and you want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck.  You want to be sure you are getting the right traffic, that are looking for exactly what your content has to offer.  Here’s some tips on how to maximize your ads effectiveness.

BROAD VS PHRASE VS EXACT KEYWORDS

when entering keywords in to your list, there 3 different ways google can read them.  For example, let’s use the keyword, stuffed animals.  you can enter it in as either

stuffed animals

“stuffed animals” OR

[stuffed animals]

When you just use stuffed animals, as your keyword term, that is known as a broad match.  Your ad will show whenever the terms stuffed, and animals, show in the search query.  If someone searched stuffed jungle animals, or stuffed chicken and other animals, your ad would show, simply because both terms are in the search.

With “stuffed animals”, the entire phrase “stuffed animals” would have to show in the search query, in order.  This means that your ad would not show with the term stuffed lobster animals, however, it would show with lobster stuffed animals, as long as the phrase appears within the search term, your ad will show, even in something like, crazy big long jungle stuffed animals, but NOT in crazy big long jungle animals stuffed, because the phrase “stuffed animals” wasn’t in it.

and Last [stuffed animals] means that only when stuffed animals is searched, will your ad show.  This is good if you want your ad to be shown only in VERY SPECIFIC circumstances.  If there is anything else in the search terms, your ad will NOT SHOW.   If a user searches stuffed animals, your ad will show ONLY when that term is searched EXACTLY, hence it’s category.

DYNAMIC KEYWORDS

Another great tip to increase the effectiveness of your keywords is to insert your keywords in to your ad dynamically.  Rather than create 100s of different ads targeting each of your different keywords, you can edit your ad so that the searched keyword term will appear each time.

For example, if you want to advertise CDs, and you want people to buy CDs, rather than change the words in your ad to say buy “particular” CD, and to change the particular for every ad, you can insert the keywords in to the ad with the following simple technique.

You just enter {keyword: default} in to your ad, and whatever is searched will appear in your ad, and if the search query makes it go over the limit in terms of its length, it will show the default keyword instead.  Let’s say your keyword list was buy Nickelback CDs, buy Backstreet Boys CDs, buy Spice Girls CDs, and buy Akon CDs.  Rather than make a seperate ad for each, your title could simply be {keyword: buy their CDs}, and it will automatically show the search query in the ad.

There’s one more bit of customization involved in doing this.  depending on how you type {keyword} it will display your ad title differently.  If you type KeyWord, it will capitalize the first letter of each word.  If you type Keyword, it will capitalize only the first word, and if you just type keyword, it will leave it lower-case.

In Advertising it’s always best to capitalize as often as you can without looking unprofessional.  Anything to get your ad to be captured by your consumers eyes, is good.  Even if that capitalization results in only a 5% increase in clicks, that 5% can mean thousands to your company in terms of sale over time, hence why you want to optimize everything as much and as often as you can.