Superior Keyword Selection

Getting ready to start an AdWords campaign, however I'm really wanting to zero in on keywords very pointedly. What tools do you find most useful in finding the best hits or permutations for a given base keyword?

Also, what steps do you usually follow to really hone in on a start point and then what steps do you take to refine or iterate your campaign?

Thanks for any input guys.

Thinking like a searcher...

Go conduct some searches. Look for the keyword contexts for your search terms that don't target your customers... tune the bad contexts out so you only pay for clicks that stand a chance of converting...

1% of PPC is picking good keywords
9% of PPC is tuning both the Ad context and the landing page context so they are both very relevant to the desired search context.
90% of PPC is tuning out the cruft that will never convert...

If you get CPA $$$ for selling cardboard boxes then tune out the Sporting context (you know, punching someone in the face until only one person is standing kind of boxes) those folks wont buy your cardboard.

Just about any AdWords book on the shelf at a bookstore will teach you how to do this better than I can. Just take a note book so you don't have to buy the book.

Interesting. Some good practical advice that seems solid. Much appreciated. Going to take some more thought. Some of what I'm doing is already very niche specific and so i can't subtract out a lot of cruft it seems, but I can see perhaps some application on the more wide areas of it.

What would your approach be in a very already specific area that you need to hone in on and perhaps has mild to medium competition?

You should pay more attention to thing things he says... he probably manages PPC budgets bigger than the average salary...

If you're niche specific you can use negatives, phrase or even exact matches to help weed out Google's idea of "gee this might match and will definitely make us more money off of you" idea of targeting.

Keeping your bounce rates low is part of keeping a high quality score, and high quality score means lower CPC.

franksio said:

Interesting. Some good practical advice that seems solid. Much appreciated. Going to take some more thought. Some of what I'm doing is already very niche specific and so i can't subtract out a lot of cruft it seems, but I can see perhaps some application on the more wide areas of it.

What would your approach be in a very already specific area that you need to hone in on and perhaps has mild to medium competition?

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1) DO NOT forget negatives otherwise you will BURN a lot of money. Most people just disregard negative keyword phrases. That's sometimes what separates a losing campaign from a winning one.

2) Start with exact match and once you get your rates, try adding phrase match. I wouldn't advise you to play with the broad match because you might get lots of irrelevant clicks.

3) ALWAYS track your keywords so you can drop the ones that are not converting. This will also increase your ctr (click through rate) and you'll have a better account history. Use prosper if you want a free solution.

4) Split test your landing pages. Group your keywords and design your landing pages according to your set of keywords. This way, you'll know which landing page is converting better. Then, you should start tweaking to get the best out of your landing page.

5) NEVER change more than one area at a time of your landing page. Otherwise you'll lose track and you won't be able to know what caused the difference.

6) Get your hands on MNF and MS. They will help you when you're doing your market research.

7) You should always understand and analyze the demographics of your niche market. Without that, you won't survive.

8) You should create different campaigns for search and content. NEVER use them both.

9) For content, you can use larger set of keywords.

10) ALWAYS do bid shifting, starting HIGH. DO NOT start low. It is very hard to keep up and ctr is very important for your account history to get cheaper clicks. So, if you start low then you'll get less clicks so your ctr will be low and someone else will get a better spot with a cheaper cost per click, while you are paying MORE for a lower spot.

11) Your conversion rate should ALWAYS be equal or less of the percentage of your commission. For instance, if your pay per click cost is $1.25, your commission should be $125 or more to be profitable. For a conversion rate of 1% for the product you are promoting, for every 100 clicks you'll spend $125 and you'll make it back with one sale. This will keep your campaign close to the breaking point. If your conversion rate is 3% for a 1$ cpc, you can't promote a product that gives you $15 commission per sale. Actually, unless you are a pro in adwords i wouldn't recommend going after campaigns that have $1+ cpc.

Most people do not think about this and then they end up with losing a lot of money on adwords. Find cheap clicks, test, tweak and scale it up. Good luck

You note, Prosper (what other options are superior; you seem to allude to this being free, but are there other strong options?), MNF and MS. Can you provide links or more specific names for each. A search yields some various matches, but nothing conclusive.

In my case, I am currently interested in conversion to a non-payed service that I'm offering. It is a social networking site that is quite unique. SO, you mention the conversion/commission ration, which is helpful, but in light of this information, what kind of advice might you have? Since I'm not "earning" anything the PPC campaign initially, how should this best be focussed and tempered on a long burn that has a low financial yield initially?

If you are using adwords to bring traffic, that's ok. Some people use it for advertising and to draw traffic to a website. As for the keyword tracking, you should focus on the keywords that are converting to a sign up. Conversion isn't only a sale, anything you want to achieve (either a sale, free sign up, opt in or zip submit etc.) is a conversion.

As i replied in PM, MS means Market Samurai and MNF is Micro Niche Finder.

Always go for the long-tail keywords, it's pointless going for the big ones; they will only lose you money.

keywordgem is FREAKING AWESOME !

have you tried using the google wonder wheel thingy? that works well

2007FLHT said:

keywordgem is FREAKING AWESOME !

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Just went and checked out keywordgem, which looks like a good strategy for beating the new Google instant search. But are you also running your lists through a competition tool such as MNF or MS?

goonieguhu said:

Just went and checked out keywordgem, which looks like a good strategy for beating the new Google instant search. But are you also running your lists through a competition tool such as MNF or MS?

Click to expand...

Of course, wouldn't make much sense to "not" do that brother

I am NOT a spokesperson for keyword gem, but I do LOVE IT ! If you give me a subject to show you what it will do, I will run it for you and email you the Excel data it feeds me to show you how well it works. I'm a busy bee, so this is a one time offer...that, and I dont want the company that makes it to get mad at me and take it from me ! haha

Peace,

RD