High traffic and low cost are always attractive for advertisers. Unfortunately, newbies often fall victim to illusions created by some market phenomenon and their own wishful thinking. Chasing a rainbow or mirage can only cause losses. It’s only data collection and exact analysis that lead to long term profits. We shall briefly discuss 2 examples of a market trap that’s often followed by a slap if you don’t beware.
1. If you set your Keyword Tool’s match type to *exact* you can determine the approximate average monthly number a given search query was keyed in by users in a specific geographic area.
2. The search query *lyrics* is keyed in by users approx. 368,000 times a month in the UK. The Ad Preview Tool, however, shows that no sponsored link comes up for this search query on Google’s search results page. It may seem to many newbies that this is a huge undiscovered market worth some investment.
The truth is that this search query does not carry what we call *commercial intent*. Users simply want to browse organically listed websites for fun and they are not interested in clicking on ads or purchasing products or services. I’d bet that quite a few advertisers tried this keyword in the past but every one failed in terms of efficiency. CTR and hence Quality Score were very low and conversion rate was even lower. Poor history made Google skeptical about this keyword which results in high bids even when no one is advertising. It’s Google’s way of warning you of danger; in addition to protecting a high quality of user experience, of course. Avoid such keywords.
3. Let’s take a bit more perceivable and more apprehensible example which is bordering a burlesque. The search query *nothing* is keyed in by users approx. 1,220,000 times in the USA. A fascinating and bewitching traffic potential, to say the least and without any competition! Unfortunately, however, while – purely based on statistical numbers – it may seem an extremely huge, enormous market niché, these people, in fact, don’t want anything. They don’t want to see your ad or click on it. They don’t want to be taken to your website, purchase a product or service, sign up for your ezine or perform any other kind of what we might perhaps term as a conversion. They simply want nothing. Pretty sure the search query they entered would tell us a lot about their intentions if they had any.
Well, jokes aside, it’s just another example for abandoned keywords. If you try to set up an ad group to target these people you’ll see that the first page bid is somewhere close to USD 1.00 even though usually no advertisers are trying to avail themselves of this keyword. Why is the first page bid estimate as high as that? It’s because a number of wannabe experts tried to exploit this market earlier and created a poor history for the keyword before realizing a complete lack of commercial intent on the users’ side.
4. In a bit more general context, let’s say you are a newbie florist. It’s interesting to look at the question where you should try selling flowers at the beginning? In the flower market where there are dozens of other florists or in a neighborhood where you are the only one. Well, if you are an inexperienced newbie I’d advise you to follow the way paved by your fellow florists. The pioneers’ attitude might only be fruitful after having gained enough experience. (Needless to say this evidently refers to AdWords, I am not knowledgeable about flowers.)
Well, what is the moral of the above? The combination of highly popular keywords and very low competition often mislead new advertisers. They often tend to think they have just discovered a huge niché promising an enormous amount of low cost traffic and a great earning potential. As it was demonstrated in the above paragraphs they had better think twice before investing funds. Whenever it is a really important factor, first you should always figure out why your competitors do behave that way.
