By artarmon42 | No Comments
Last updated: Friday, June 22, 2007

I’ve been really focused on building some solid Google Adwords campaigns recently, and I’ve come to the realization that there is something seriously screwy with Adword’s default “broad match” option. Turns out Google’s definition of “broad” is pretty damn broad!

As an example, a broad match of against “cingular ringtones” will catch:

1. “ringtones” - Apparently Google figures that “cingular” isn’t necessary
2. “razr ringtones” - It seems that Google figures there are alot of Cingular RAZR phones, so “cingular” can be arbitrarily replaced with “razr”
3. “cingular caller tones” - Just because Google believes that “ringtones” is closely related to “caller tones”

This kind of (crazy-super) broad matching sucks because:

1. If you hardcode your ad’s title or if you use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (which will display the triggered keyword “cingular ringtones”) then your ad’s title will say something like “Cingular Ringtones” even though the searcher might have a Verizon phone. RESULT: your Click Through Ratio (CTR) will drop to hell faster than you can delete that keyword.
2. If the searcher was looking for “razr ringtones” (because they have a Verizon RAZR) and your ad comes up with “Cingular Ringtones”, guess where your CTR is headed to?
3. For those that don’t know, Caller Tones is what your CALLER hears when they call you. The Ringtones affiliates offer ringtones _not_ caller tones (which I believe only can be offered by the carriers). RESULT: You’ll get clicks that’ll suck your bank account dry, with no conversions.

And remember in Adwords, CTR is key to your Quality Score (QS). Lower QS will result in lower placements and more expensive bids. So impressions without clicks (lowering your CTR) will hurt your entire campaign.

So how do you overcome these broad match problems?

1. Find those other words that Google thinks are the same, and put them in that adgroup’s Negative Keyword List (NKL).
2. Once again put it in your adgroup’s NKL. In fact, I put a negative keyword against every other adgroup I have. So my cingular adgroup has verizon in the group’s NKL, and my verizon adgroup has cingular in the group’s NKL.
3. Yes, you guessed it. Put “caller tones” in your campaign-level NKL.

In summary, with Adwords, be very careful of your broad matches. Negative keywords are probably more important than your keywords.

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