Keywords are Curate's Egg, Make the Most of Them

Keywords are at the center of managing a search ad campaign.

You can further divide them into Exact, Phrase and Broad. They Provide targeting precision in the same order. Broad gives you really broad coverage of search queries, you need to block the bad part of it on routine basis. No matter how old and tight your campaigns are they will keep on surprising you. To a lesser extent same is the case with phrase too, however we can guess its bad part with reasonably good accuracy. Those who live and breathe exact matches find it too costly, sooner or later.

3 Solutions for Managing Keyword Match types

1. All Match Types In the Same Adgroup

   An age old practice in adwords. Soon after finishing up with Keyword List, break them into Three Parts: [kw], "kw" & kw, then & there. If you remember, we used to set the bids too using asterix after them. You can bid on them in decreasing order starting from highest for exact and lowest for broad for the same keyword. Earlier, no matter how many times you have added the keywords, Google consolidated the stats for them and assigned same Quality Score irrespective of the match types. However, things have changed now and all are treated differently. There are reports that it is no more the most restrictive type which will reflect the stats, actually broad may compete with exact and phrase for same query. So, this technique though has the merit of simplicity, there are some caveats associated with it.

2. Different adgroups for different match types

   Maintaining different adgroups for each match types allows you to add negative as exact in broad and phrase adgroups. So you go like this Phrase Adgroup will have Exact as negative and broad will have phrase as negative. In this way you will have traffic for each adgroups which does not interfere with each other and so you can set bids according to priority. This method achieves everything except for segregation of budget.

3. Different Match types in different Campaigns

   To allocate different Budget which are allocated to each type you need to segregate them into Campaign. I had talked about penumbra match type, for brand keywords. However, no matter what match type you added Google blocks all the queries around it and it spills over to many keywords. So, to keep tab on them it is better to put them into different campaigns now. Also, keeping different match types in different campaigns will give you better ROI, because there is nil chance your bad keywords eating into the share of Good ones. So, if you are dealing with account that has limited number of keywords and accuracy matters the most, it should be implemented.

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Should Google Introduce a Racist Patch or Remove it !

Professor Latanya Sweeney, Harvard University

Harvard's Professor Latanya Sweeney has published a research work revealing significant racism in the delivery of Google Adwords ads. According to her, it was clearly observed that names which were suggestive of black ethnicity were showing ads of criminal background checks, with ads clearly mentioning names, while same was not the case with names suggesting white ethnicity. Latanya Sweeney backed her claim citing several examples and also clearly showing how Google's own image search returns black and white people against those names.

It has raised a pertinent  question: Is Google's algorithm racist?

Google claims it does no racial profiling of names, and outcome may be because of clickability of names, given the context in which the ads appear. A plausible explanation from the algorithm company. It means it is the racist bias in the mind of end users, which is responsible for the racially skewed delivery of the ads.

Now the question is whether Google is honest in its claim? Sweeney suggests, whatever be the case the delivery has to be racially normalised, because this discrimination comes under the sociological definition of Racism, practicing which is illegal in modern societies across the world.

Prof. Latanya Sweeney is not a Google Advertising Professional, so she has little insight into why this happens. However, I have a similar observation to offer, while using names in ads.

Contrary to Prof. Sweeney's belief, people who create ads, don't manually insert different names into it. I have a similar experience with creating ads around names for a matrimonial website of somewhat dubious merit (So, name withheld). Here a template is created and generic ads are written, with a dynamic tag to fetch the names from a group of keywords, called adgroup in adwords terminology.  So, if I have put different names like, Rekha, Uma, Katrina... as keywords and make an ad like,  Marry {KeyWord:DefaultText} google will start serving ads like, Marry Rekha, Marry Uma...

The above example is a real case which I have myself observed. Whereas, Google served the ads Marry Rekha, Marry Uma... it served Marry DefaultText in case of katrina, which even stopped serving after sometime!! This is a somewhat 4 years old story & I couldn't fathom the reason behind it. Katrina, though suggestive of a white ethnicity is also a famous Indian actress. So, if Rekha & Uma could be served why Google didn't serve Katrina. It might had had got more clicks!! So, I don't buy Google's logic. Now, Prof. Sweeney has revealed which I had observed long back, some of you too may have observed this effect.

 photo credit: Kenya Allmond via photopin cc

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Writing Adtexts to Boost Conversion of Your Adwords Campaign – Strategy!

Some adtexts convert better than others.

Some ads have better CTR than other.

To get optimum CTR and Conversion, You need to continuously test ads for performance. Some phrases do the trick, experiment them as much you can. From my experience with managing vast number of campaigns I can tell you what works best, rather what has worked best for me and my clients.

While creating adtexts, it is always a good idea to do some searches on keywords you are targeting to see what people are already writing. Now, you have to evolve a strategy. you have to cut through this clutter.

There are some basic rules which you should learn first and there are some advanced strategies, which I would discuss later.  some of the points that you should always follow are:

1. If you are writing for search, don’t ever ignore the keywords, you have  in the adgroup. Use them as much as you can. Use them in Headline, text line & Display URL. More keywords you use, more attention you get.
   
   
2. Use at least 3 adtexts in an adgroup, and seldom go beyond 5.  Fewer adtexts would give you lesser choice of eliminating the worst performer. Also, fewer ads mean you are testing fewer ideas, and testing is the key to take your campaign to higher level. Too many would also be a problem, because then you won’t get enough data for each of them to eliminate the worst. More the data better the decision you make.
   
   
3. Always use some lines from the landing page itself. It helps maintain the scent, you already have dropped in the ad. Conversion happens because visitors sense something on reading the adtext, if she easily finds the same on the landing page, she falls in love with the website and is eager to take the next step.
   
   
4. Use call to actions like, Try, Buy, Get etc. Point to be noted here is that all call to action don’t give the same kind of result. Some does just the opposite of what you have anticipated. So, testing is again the key.
   
   
5. Always try to write Full Length Adtext. This means you should make use of all available character limits. It has been observed, full length adtexts perform better, with lesser chances of failing.

Above rules would help you get started with your Search Ads. For better results, you would need to keep on eliminating the worst performer and creating the new ones for further testing. You can in this way keep on trying and eliminating the ads, and hence, keep on boosting your performance to the next level. While refining you should keep in mind:

1. If wide variation in CTR is observed. Don’t knock out the High CTR ad, if it performs mediocre in terms of conversion. Very often you would find, low CTR ads give better conversion rate, but once you knock out the high CTR ad, QS of ADG start suffering, ad delivery deteriorates, and hence conversion rate drops and rather cost of conversion shoots up. So, while filtering always have your eyes fixed on CTR, which must not fall below the optimum.
   
   
2. Also while filtering, see if some Ad Keyword pairing would perform better, if shifted to a new adgroup. So, before knocking out try exploring if these ad-keyword pair may perform better in a different adgroup. If you can identify adgroup within an adgroup, it opens a fresh new opportunity.
   
   
3. Apply logic what idea converts and why they converted, if any ad has any conversion data to its credit, however poor it may be. If that ad you are going to remove had an idea which you can grasp, that gave conversion, try using that in combination with other ideas, in other ads.

If you find Adtext1 and adtext2 are top performers. Try to create Adtext3 which sums up the merit of the two. I call this Summation. This often gives wonderful results. If you can catch which idea is getting converted in those adtexts, you can always come up with a better ad copy.

Just like summation, also try removing something from the ads. sometimes you may hit upon a great ad copy doing this. You might be able to figure out what is turning off potential visitors, or even concealing something may actually be beneficial!

Keep on repeating the above two processes to continuously improve your ad copy.

Last but not the least, the real key to write great ad copy is to discover the persona of your buyer. If you hit upon the right trigger, you will gain great advantage over all your competitors. Always discover as much as you can about them.

Also Read:

1. 1+9Bold Ideas for Writing Google Adwords Ad Text/Ad Copy that ...
2. Red Signal to Green on Landing Page
3. User Behavior Anatomy: How You should Write your Ad Copy

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Impact of Adgroup Restructuring on Conversions

We tend to break keywords into themes. Its a good practice. However, an optimum level exists, where further breaking may result into decrease in conversion rate, which might result into negative ROI.

We often break Adgroups into Themes and microthemes. You can break adroups into as many themes as you can. People tend to think, breaking Adgroups into themes increases Quality Score and hence decreases cost per conversion. However, it is not always true. It may increase your quality score but may also decrease your conversion rate. Further, Google's system does not have any Adgroup level Quality Score. System recognises only Keywords and adtexts. However, a pseudo quality score does come into existence at adgroup level, because of this very set up and assuming its existence is beneficial, but tighter theme does not enhance it. Consider a case, where:

ADG= Theme1 + Theme2 + Theme3. ; Now breaking it into, ADG1, ADG2, ADG3 for individual themes, would increase the frequency of ad delivery. However, it would also decrease the rate of conversion. It is my observation, though can be proven mathematically too, Conversion rate for ADG > conv rate of (ADG1 + ADG2 + ADG3). If you are concerned about the cost and have budget limitations, which is practically a barrier for every advertising campaign, breaking keywords into too many themes is not a good idea. Advertisers who manage dedicated campaigns for Display network alone, should pay more attention to conversion data, because you never get keyword level data for these campaigns, and adgroups are structured according to themes alone. If you have too many adgroups in your campaign, try consolidating them by removing unnecessary grouping. A good campaign does have keywords grouped around a theme into adgroups, I do not mean to propose anything against this idea. However, it might become too much and may require consolidation to improve your conversion rate, and this does improve it.

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