A Quick Tip to Increase Your AdWords Efficiencies

Jul 21, 2010 by Jonathan

It is now standard practice in online marketing to duplicate your AdWords keywords across two or three match types in an effort to maximize the traffic that a single term can capture.

The drawback to this approach is that as Google drives traffic to the post popular term, often searches on that specific term won’t be driven through to the Exact match version as they should, but rather to Phrase or Broad match variations.

The problem here is that Phrase and Broad matched keywords often attract less relevant ad impressions that don’t result in clicks on your ad.  This means that their Click Through Rate (CTR) will be lower, lowering the Quality Score (QS) that Google attributes that keyword, leading to the possibility of an increased Cost Per Click (CPC).

The knock on affect is that despite having the term on Exact match in your campaign, you often have to pay a higher CPC for searches on that specific term as the traffic is being routed through a Broad or Phrase match variation.

Multiply this over thousands of terms and suddenly your costs significantly increase and your overall CTR and QS suffers.

However there is a solution!

For example should you have the keyword ‘dvd player’ on Phrase, Broad and Exact match in an Ad Group:

1. Create a copy of the Ad Group
2. Using AdWords Editor*, Delete all the keywords in the duplicate Ad Group
3. Drag and drop the Exact match term from the original Ad Group into the new duplicate Ad Group.
4. In the original Ad Group add the term ‘dvd player’ as an exact negative.

What you should be left with is two Ad Groups that are essentially identical, except one holds Phrase and Broad match keywords and the other the Exact match variations.

The inclusion of the Exact Match Negative in the Ad Group with the Phrase and Broad variations means that those terms will still capture the “fringe” traffic they were previously, but any searches specifically on the term ‘dvd player’ will be directed to the Exact match variation in the new ad group, where you should enjoy a higher CTR, improved QS and ultimately a lower CPC.

It also acts as a very good test of just how much fringe traffic the Phrase and Broad match settings do pick up, as well as increasing your accounts efficiency.

*Using AdWords Editor to drag and drop existing keywords means that you do not have to delete any of those original keywords, preserving any click history and Quality Score they have built up.