Looking for some ‘free polling software’ today and I found an ‘AdWords Blooper’.
Norton Anti Virus showing for "free polling software"
Norton (Norton Antivirus) has an ad being served for the search query “free polling software” but Norton does not offer polling software.
This is a great example of the importance of Negative Keywords. If Norton is appearing #4 then I am sure this is not the first time they appeared in error, maybe it is some strange marketing tatic, but I doubt it. I think it is just a simple case of a broad match keyword gone haywire.
How Could this Happen?
This happens when advertisers use broad or “phrase” match keywords because these types of keyword matching options will allow for the keyword to ‘expand’ to other relevant keywords. For instance ‘ballet shoes’ could expand to ‘red ballet shoes’, ‘mens ballet shoes’, ‘adult ballet shoes’, ‘used ballet shoes’, ’size 13 ballet shoes’ and many others.
Why Should Norton Care?
Two reasons:
first they are receiving impressions for search queries that are irrelevant to their product which lowers their CTR and diminishes quality.
Second, people may actually be curious enough to click on their ads costing Norton needless expense. When I saw the name Norton on the results page I was instantly intrigued thinking that Norton offered some kind of free polling software. I would be more than happy to go with a trusted name like Norton…however they do not offer polling software – only virus protection on the landing page.
What Can Norton do to Prevent This from Happening Again?
Simply add a negative keyword -polling, to the campaign level and it would help prevent the ads from appearing anytime ‘polling’ is included in the search query.
How can you make sure this does not happen to you?
Special Note: The purpose of this article was not to pick on anyone managing Norton’s account. This happens to the best of us, maybe the account is new, maybe they added a new keyword that they have not reviewed yet. The point of the blog post is Negative Keywords are important and it is important to stay on-top of discovering and adding them to your account, it is a never ending process.
……….
First page bid estimates are what google approximates you would have to pay to be visible on the first page of search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. This first page bid estimate (FPBE) is based on your keyword quality score. If your keyword quality is low then you will likely have a higher FPBE than you would have if your keyword quality score were better.
Checking your first page bid estimates is a good way to identify areas for improvement, develop a bidding strategy, and identifying keywords that may be less expensive than others.
There are two ways to view your first page bid estimate.
1. keyword/placement performance report. Customize the report to show the First Page Bid Estimate.
Customizing your Keywords/Placement Performance Report to show First Page Bid Estimate
2. Spreadsheet edit feature is a quick way to review your first page bid estimates.
How to View your First Page Bid Estimates in Spreadsheet Edit.
The spreadsheet edit will display the first page bid estimates like this:
Spreadsheet Edit - First Page Bid Estimates
Again, look at your first page bid estimates from time to time to analyze what effect your quality score has on your account.
If your keyword list contains broad or phrase match keywords then negative keywords are most often a must.Negative keywords prevent your ads from appearing and potentially receiving clicks from search queries that are not relevant to your product or service.Suppressing impressions (and clicks) from irrelevant search queries will improve your CTR and quality score and allow your keyword list to work harder to bring qualified prospects to your website.
AdWords Offers the Following Negative Match types:
Negative Broad Matched – To create a standard negative keyword, insert a minus sign before a keyword and add it to your ad group or campaign.
Example: -free download
Adding this negative keyword to your account would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and download Your ads still have the potential to appear for variations of these terms. Your ads will also still show on search queries that only contain one of the terms.
For example, the search queries software download andfree software could trigger your ads, while free software downloadwill not.
Negative “Phrase” Matched - To create a negative phrase matched keyword surround the term with quotation marks.
Example: -”free download“
Adding this keyword the system wouldn’t let any search query containing the phrasefree downloadtrigger your ads. The search query free download accounting softwarewould not trigger your ads. However, your ads could possibly show on the search querydownload accounting software or free accounting software.
Negative [Exact] Matched – To create a negative exact matched keyword surround the term with brackets
Example: -[free download]
This negative keyword would only prevent your ads from showing on the search queryfree download. Search queries such asfree accounting software download andfree software could still trigger your ads.
It is suggested to add relevant variations of your negative keywords, including both the singular and plural forms.Learnto add effective negative keywords to your ad group or campaign.
Now that we have some familiarity with negative keyword match types the next question is how do we identify negatives to add to the account?AdWords offers two tools to identify negative keywords.
The search query report is a very helpful report to identifying negative keywords.This report will show advertisers what the actual query was that resulted in their ads being served.You can use this report to identify negative keyword to add to your account.
See Previous Interface in the upper right corner of your keyword tool to use the old keyword tool interface as outlined below in this video..
Adding Negative keywords is easy.They can be added at the campaign level to cover all adgroups or at the ad group level if the negative keywords are specific to one category.
Research your Search Query Reports regularly to identify negative keywords.Negative keywords will improve your CTR and preserve your budget by showing your ads to only the best prospects for business.
Relevance is a pivotal, key concept of AdWords, Google’s flagship advertising program. The California-based giant emphasizes at various places that its advertising system is designed to ensure positive user experiences by displaying relevant ads to searchers. However, what relevant means has been and continues to be a headache for thousands of advertisers worldwide.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the adjective relevant means “having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand,” which might well prove an important but elusive definition for our rather practical purposes. On the other hand, the AdWords Glossary states, “Relevance refers to the usefulness of information to a user (such as an ad, keyword, or landing page).” Could an automated system ever come anywhere close to understanding the psychological notion associated with relevance and usefulness, or is it just walking around in circles with definitions?
Google does not disclose details about precisely how relevance should be interpreted; and one of the first explanatory notes came from AdWordsPro, a manager of the AdWords Team, in the official AdWords forum last year. A member wanted to improve the ad position for his keyword “stuffer,” associated with his website featuring stuffers, i.e., field goose decoys made from a taxidermist-preserved skin. AdWordsPro says, “Taking the keyword ’stuffer’ as an example, if you search for that word on Google you will see that there are over two million search results returned. Looking at the first 30 or so, it is very clear that the most common usage of the word ’stuffer’ is in the context of either a ’sausage stuffer’ or a ’stocking stuffer,’ neither of which pertain at all to your product. This tells me that if you used the keyword ’stuffer,’ your ad would mostly be seen by folks who are NOT looking for what you have. Instead they are looking for something that is 100% unrelated to what you offer.”
Based on the above hints we might have the courage to continue like this. If you google the search term “chevron,” all the natural listings displayed on your first search results page will be associated with the oil company. However, the dictionary’s primary meaning of “chevron” is a badge consisting of stripes meeting at an angle, worn on the sleeve by noncommissioned officers, police officers, etc., as an indication of rank, service, or the like.
Now, if you create a campaign to promote your website that markets such striped badges, you might, of course, want to use the keyword “chevron.” Based on the dictionary’s meaning, you might set up very tight and relevant adverts and landing pages for this keyword. However, no matter what you do, Google will find your keyword “chevron” irrelevant to your landing page, because of the accrued statistics. In plain English, Google likely will think that users searching for “chevron” are interested in nothing but the energy giant. Chances are that’s what historical data indicate.
In a recent ad group level experiment we used two keywords, “company” and “companies.” Being a singular and a plural, their close semantic relationship was more than manifest. This is how the system evaluated them.
Keyword: “company” “companies”
Quality Score: 3/10 7/10
Relevance: Poor No Problem
All in all, we have good reasons to believe that it’s not dictionary or semantic relevance that matters, it’s what we should term G-relevance. The calculations are based on historical Google-wide CTR stats along with similar factors, and not on preliminary mapping of semantic fields. This simplified version of artificial intelligence is a plausible explanation of why we often see different relevance and QS values for semantically highly related keywords. Chances are good that Google has differing stats on those words when associated with adverts and websites similar to the ones we created for the keywords in question.
From time to time, when checking on the quality scores of your keywords, you may find yourself in a situation similar to one of the scenarios described above. You may assume the story is about Google-wide stats. Remember, chances are, it’s not worth wondering about it a lot. Instead you’re advised to focus your attention on trying to identify new keywords that are equally favored by Google and meeting your requirements.
An effective AdWords campaign usually will undergo major changes in its life. It is often difficult to build a perfect account from the start, for many it is a learn as you go process. This series of Improvement Quick Tips are designed to take an account that is performing OK and take it to a new level of performance. The incentives to improve an account include a higher conversion rate and higher quality scores which equate to lower costs per click. The question becomes how do we make quality score great. Is there a way to continue to refine an account to further increase the quality score, increase conversions and reduce costs? Answer = Yes.
Organizing Your Account – Ad Group Themes
Organizing your account into tightly knit ad groups around a specific theme can increase relevance and account quality. When ad text is directly related to keywords, customers identify better with the ad because it so closely matched their search query. This results in a higher click-through-rate (CTR) which will increase quality score.
For this example I have setup an account for a door repair service. The keywords I selected for the service were: door repair, commercial door repair, storm door repair and entry door repair. The ad text is generic with “Door Repair” as the title.
Sample 1
Keywords in NON Specific Themes
A New Approach
I decided to reorganize the ad groups into themes. This example outlines the ’Storm Door Repair’ theme. I created a new ad group labeled ’storm door repair’ and created ad text with Storm Door Repair in the title. Keywords were selected to focus strictly on storm door repair. The CTR increased and the Cost per click (CPC) was greatly reduced. The original cost, $2.19 average CPC to $1.14 average CPC.
Sample 2
Theme
Why the Improvement?
The improvement is directly related to the relevance of the ad text to keywords. People can identify with the advertisement. The relevance in the theme is stronger. Setting up an account this way can be time consuming; starting with a setup like scenario 1 and work to identify what keywords deserve their own group may be a good approach for someone that does not have a lot of extra time.
When are we done improving?
Never really. I find that I am always looking to improve an account, finding ways to increase quality score, reduce costs and ultimately increase conversions. My next step on this account will be to include specific keyword matching options such as [Exact] and “Phrase” match. This will increase the CTR even further. I will also test different ad variations of the Storm Door Repair ad text to find the most compelling ad text possible.
Sample 2 does not reflect a change in quality score yet, but in time it will. While we wait for the new quality score to be reflected we can enjoy that lower CPC.
Future Improvement Quick Tips will include: Keywords, Ad Text, Bidding, Tracking Codes, Reading & Understanding Account Data, The Reports Center, Implementing Changes, Optimizing Websites and More.
A very common complaint by new advertisers in the AdWords Help Forum is that their newly placed adverts will run well, typically for a few days, and then stop running. Often, the advertiser will notice that Google is complaining of a low “Quality Score”. This video blog with supporting notes is a consequence of a charity posting their problems, together with sample adverts and keywords. This unusual openness makes them a great candidate for a case study.
Google Video – lower quality, faster to display, click the “Play” button at lower left:
Click on the link at the end of this sentence for a higher quality, large QuickTime Movie – where you can see the detail of the slides and screens, showing precisely which links to click to setup a new AdWords account, as a new AdWords user.
The video shows choosing a Standard Edition rather than Starter Edition AdWords Account. I’ve picked “Standard Edition” because the best use of AdWords usually comes from the additional power of the Standard Edition account. The Starter Edition limits you to a single campaign – and you need at least two campaigns to fully manage performance.
In the video I warn that users should not use a publicly known email address, especially if they have given other people access to their normal email account; perhaps a family member or an office colleague. Since the AdWords account controls the spending of money, make sure that everyone who has access to the Google AdWords Account, uses their own account name; that way you can trace decisions and actions. Especially make sure that the account names that are used, are not published anywhere. My standard practice is that I have public email addresses and private email email addresses. The private email addresses are used for receiving email from AdWords only, so no one knows their identities, other than AdWords. If you know an email address to send me email, then that’s one email address you can be sure I won’t be using for AdWords management!
AdWords Account Activation Email
Note the addresses that Google uses in the confirmation eMail. Especially notice that the right URL to sign in to AdWords is “h t t p s : / / a d w o r d s . g o o g l e . c o m /” If you see anything else at the beginning of the URL, then you may be visiting a spoof site that will try to steal from you.
Campaign Setup
The video steps through the process. Key points:
Name this first campaign “Keyword targeted” – because that’s what we’re doing
Target one language and one country per campaign – this is usually the most effective
If your budget is high enough, then select “Accelerated Spending” to maximise your impression volume
If your budget is too low to spend all day, use the default budget method – this spreads spending through the day
Deselect the “Content Network”, despite the popup window that warns you about losing traffic; we’ll set up the content network in a later video.
Select “Rotate” adverts, rather than allowing Google to optmise; it is easy to manage advert performance and rotation allows you to optimise better than the default.
Schizophrenia Charity
You can guess at the most likely keywords that a Schizophrenia information charity should offer. As it happens, the advertiser decided to appeal to a particular symptom, hearing voices. So the advert didn’t include any of the keywords. That’s almost certainly why he has a poor quality score… Psychological factors.
User Psychology
If someone types in “schizophrenia”, then they probably are looking for information about it. If they type “red leather shoes” then they probably want information and possibly sales sites featuring read leather shoes. Advertisements that mention the keyword help to assure the user that the right advert is showing. By coming back to them with what they said, you show you are listening and that you address their interests. The difference in Click Through Rate (the percentage of impressions that result in clicks) between using and not-using the Keyword in the advert can be more than 50% – you can double click rates by using the keyword in the copy.
We’re going to use that technique of “mirroring” to help get a good quality score in the adverts.
If the keyword is “schizophrenia”, then we should use that word in the title of the advertisement.
If the keyword was “luxury red shoes”, then we should use that.
User Psychology – Continue The Dialog
Apart from using the keyword, what else needs to be said? Classic marketing – a Call to Action. Obviously you want people to click and come to your site, but what will make them come? A low selling price? A wider range? A free delivery service? Free extended warranty? What is *your* unique appeal that will have a segment of the audience click on your advert more than they will click on other advertisements?
In the case of the Schizophrenia advice charity, they probably have three audiences. The person who is hearing voices – who probably won’t be inquiring about Schizophrenia. The friends and family – the social network – of the schizophrenic, who may want support and advice and might be searching for “Schizophrenia”, or “hearing voices”, or “psychosis”, or looking up side effects of prescribed medication, or a bunch of other search queries. And finally medical professionals – the care network – who probably have specific terms and may be considering the use of specific drugs for treatments.
When you have three segments, and overlapping keywords, you should probably offer three different web sites. The types of people going to each should be different, will need different language in the landing page and think about the problems they are trying to solve in different ways. That also means that potentially you might *need* to advertise three times on the same keyword – expecting different segments to click on different adverts and go to three different websites.
We’ll look at that, a very advanced concept in advertising, later. For now, let’s focus on reaching the main groups in the obvious ways. As you learn the techniques, you can start to apply some subtlety!
Google Video about improving advertising with AdWords
Since publishing this article, Google has produced a short video that emphasises many similar points:
Summary
This technique is about focus for new advertisers. Instead of spreading widely and becoming confused, pick a keyword that is the essence of what you do. Whether that is “lawn mower repair”, “luxury teas”, or a charitable operation. Pick that one word and write the best advert you can, that will bring people to the best page on your site that addresses the implicit question. If you have to, create a new page to make sure you address the search query.
Restrict the campaign to avoid the content network. The content network has its uses, but you need to target in a different way, and the adverts often should be different. Budgeting – is tricky. Generally, for a first campaign, keep the bid lower in order to get more clicks from the budget. There are reasons to worry about position, but you’ve enough to learn getting just one AdGroup working properly.
Before looking at anything else, this would be a good time for you to explore the rest of the user interface, and especially look at the reporting and web analytics. Future steps in performance improvement will require web analytics on your web site, or AdWords Conversion Tracking… But that’s still a few steps away!
Updates
2009-06-06 – Added Google video about optimising adverts – it echoes many of the same points made here.
I have looked at numerous accounts this week and am so surprised to see keywords that just don’t belong in their accounts, with a poor Quality Score (QS) and horribly low Click Through Rate (CTR). Not only does this drag their accounts down, it also wreaks havoc on the keywords’ CTR performance for every advertiser that should be using the keyword.
For instance, I recently looked at an account for a personal trainer. The account held keywords like ‘beach’, ‘weight watchers’, ‘excercise equipment’, none of which he offers, but are somewhat related. Of course you want a good body to go to the beach; “weight watchers” is another option to a personal trainer and when you visit this personal trainer you will use excercise equipment. Now, all of these keywords have a poor quality score and terrible CTR, and of course they should! This account has been running these keywords for months accruing a terrible historical CTR. Eventually this account may grind to a complete halt due to these keywords’ low CTR alone. Before that happens though, he will damage these keywords for other advertisers who do sell ‘excercise equipment’. This is why Google considers quality score important. A poor quality score is a deterrent. An indicator that something is wrong, that perhaps the keyword should be seriously re-evaluated and possibly removed all together. Google want’s you to stay relevant. It is the building block of adwords. It keeps things in check. It also keeps advertisers happy and ultimately keeps the end users of Google happy when they are provided with search results that are relevant to their query. If I wanted to find a weight watchers meeting in my area I would not expect to see ‘personal trainers’ in the search results. If Google can not keep their end users happy by presenting them with relevant search results then people will stop using Google and the end result will be the advertisers using AdWords not reaching the largest audience available on the internet.
How this effects you.
When an advertisers sets up an account and selects their keywords they receive an initial quality score based on the historical performance of the keyword on the AdWords system. Advertisers that have misused keywords have lowered that historical performance for other advertisers.
Can You Fix it?
Yes, If you find a newly added keyword that is truly relevant to your product or service has a poor score work on the CTR. Once you add a keyword to your account you can increase it’s quality if it is relevant to your ad text and landing page and achieves a good CTR. It make take time to accrue positive CTR history.
Notes:
Don’t use keywords that are not directly related to your product or service.
If you see a Poor Quaity Score or very low CTR (aside from the content network) something is wrong and needs to be addressed immediately.
Don’t freak outwhen you see a low Quality Score on a keyword that you know is very relevant, it is just that the keyword did not get a good performance history on the system, likely due to other advertisers misusing the keyword. If you are getting a good CTR with the keyword it’s Quality Score will improve.
The Search Query Performance Report is one of my favorite reports. It is helpful for extracting new keywords, determining new keyword matching options and finding -negative keywords to reduce unwanted impressions and clicks. Overall it is going to provide valuable data to assist you in increasing CTR to give your account a better quality score and an edge over your competition.
The data below is from an account that was brought to my attention because it was failing to provide a return on investment. To protect this clients identity and keywords I am blacking out part of the keyword. He sells coffee products so for the purpose of further explinations let’s replace the blacked out keyword with ‘folgers’.
Broad Match Keywords = low CTR
As you can see the broad match keyword generated a lot of impressions but few clicks resulting in a low CTR. Because broad match will allow keywords to be inserted before the keyword, after the keyword or related synonyms be used for the keyword the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ can match a broad range of queries.
The first thing I did when I got my hands on the account was run a Search Query Performance Report. The broad match keyword ‘folgers’ generated the below queries circled in red as well as many other queries that I have not shown here. As you can see people were performing search queries on ‘folgers coffee packets’ and the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ was allowing the query to show the ads. There were a good number of impressions for ‘folgers coffee packets’ so I have added the new keyword to the account.
Search Query Performance Report - personal info withheld
The data from the SQPR allowed me to extract many new keywords to add to the account. It also told me to add some negative keywords such as ‘-makers’ because this ad group is specific to coffee (I have another group for makers). Not shown in this report is the many misspelled variations of the keyword I found. I added keywords for all of these misspellings also.
The Below report is a sampling of new keywords I extracted from the SQPR. This is the next day’s data and already look at that CTR! I will keep the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ for now. I expect to see the impressions for the keyword start to drop while I absorb some of those impressions with these more specific variations. The drop in impressions will cause the ‘folgers’ keyword CTR to improve and I can continue to run the report to find more keywords that have good traffic to add to the account. Eventually I may pause the keyword. Note that all the keywords in the report.2 are new are added in exact or phrase match to further increase CTR by restricting the search queries they can appear on.
As you can see the CTR increased dramatically from the broad match keyword ‘folgers’. These scores overtime will help this account to achieve a fantastic historical CTR and the keywords that are scored as OK will eventually become GREAT scores with a really good historical CTR.
Starting small is golden therefore newbie’s performance numbers are usually not big enough. I mean say hundreds of or a few thousand impressions a month, and much much fewer clicks. If you have ever tried to ride a bycicle you know that while it can be pretty easy at a reasonable speed, as you are slowing your vehicle down, balancing might get more and more difficult. A newbie may be in a similar situation if he wants to investigate the relationship between the CTR of a broad or phrase match keyword and its Quality Score. (It’s common knowledge that CTR, or Click-through-rate, is the most important factor considered by the AdWords system in the calculation of your Quality Score. Now we are supposing that the beginner wishes to monitor in his account how his improving CTR will lead to better Quality Scores.)
Paradoxically, he may experience a considerable increase in CTR associated with a worsening Quality Score or vica versa. The reason for it is that the AdWords system only gathers Quality Score data when a user’s query exactly matches the keyword in your account. E.g. in case you have the phrase match keyword “holidays” in your ad group it may happen that 10 users keying in the search query *summer holidays* see your ad and click on it. Say that 10 other users key in the exact search query *holidays* but none of them clicks on your sponsored link. In this scenario your phrase match keyword’s Click-through-rate is a fantastic 50% (10/20) while your exact match specific CTR is 0%. The consequence is that though you have a really high overall CTR, your Quality Score is pretty bad.
It may be frustrating and resulting in a distorted picture. It’s perhaps even more lamentable that you get the least information in this respect in the most sensitive first stage of your learning curve. For this reason I’d advise every newbie to list their broad or phrase match keywords as 2 match types — broad & exact or phrase & exact. That way at least they are likely to grasp more quickly what is happening and why to the relationship between the CTR of their broad or phrase match keyword and its Quality Score.
Note that if the performance numbers are really huge, the above scenario is practically out of question. In such cases when you are improving the CTR of the broad match or phrase match, you should be statistically improving the underlying or embedded exact match CTR as well. However, this post is meant for newbies with low performance numbers.
All my former keywords (bids of a few cents for each click, #1 position) were suddenly doomed “poor quality” and “not relevant”. The minimum bid was raised to almost 90 cents though there is no competition.
It’s a complaint we hear most often from newbies to the Google AdWords advertising program.
You should see right away that the amount you bid is not the amount you pay. Google AdWords uses a so-called second price auction model the effect of which is that while you may bid 90 cents, the paid amount will probably be much less. The bid in this case indicates your seriousness, how much you *could* be paying. Of course, you can’t know for sure before you accrue clicks. However, based on general experience we may state that the price will be really lower since you have few competitors. Try to get a good click-through-rate and the actual CPC will go on lowering down to $0.10 or so. It should be noted that some savvy advertisers are known to have bid around $100.00 and paid $0.01. Generally speaking, your short-term competitors may increase the average CPC temporarily their actual costs, however, will get them to leave finally.
What you should achieve is to have a nice CTR in the region of 5% or higher, keyword search only. The Google AdWords system is considered to assume a cca. 2.5% CTR until you build up a meaningful history specifying your own actual CTR. Specialists argue the system seems to have a price goal for the space which is in fact a lower limit. In case your landing pages, ads and keywords are fine you may receive a good initial minimum bid. AdWords, however, modifies the minimum bids in stages. The second stage is the very first visit by the AdWords bot exploring your landing page quality and various relevance factors. If the bot results are poor you may see a sudden increase in your minimum bids which newbies are often upset with. Now you need to discover what the problems might be, create a new ad group and cancel the former one.
If the above remedies don’t cure the situation you are punished by a poor account history in the course of the AdWords auction. Established online businesses often rehabilitate such keywords by moving them to a new Google AdWords account. Small ventures, of course, are often unable to follow suite and have more difficulties with solving the problem. All in all, we may state that if you have few competitors you will not have to pay high costs per click for extended periods of time. Precondition is, of course, that you need to build up a meaningful history with acceptable CTR values so as to lower the actual prices. It’s plenty of work to do for any new advertiser.
