SEO Blog

I mentioned in my 11 Tips To Improve Your Google AdWords Campaign (point #11!) that you need to run the Search Query report if you’re bidding on broad match keywords.

To access this report, you need to log in to your AdWords account, select the ‘Reports’ tab and then go to ‘Create Report’ in the sub-menu.

Search Query Report within Google AdWords

The reason we put so much importance on the Search Query report is because it uncovers some* of the actual keywords that AdWords has used as synonym replacements for those PPC advertisers using broad match.

*Whilst it shows some, it also misses a lot. Depending on how many clicks you put through your account, these ‘Other unique queries’ that appear in your report, could add up to a lot of wasted spend. It is possible to identify these keywords too but that involves setting up some advanced filtering in Google Analytics. We do this for all of our clients and their campaigns benefit from this further optimisation.

So why is it important to identify the actual search term rather than the phrase in your account that generated the click? Negatives! Running a successful AdWords campaign is a juggling act between maximising visits to your site whilst restricting wasted clicks, i.e. those searches that still click on your ad even though there’s no or little relevance to what they were looking for. This is where negative keywords come in. Negatives are added to your campaign and are used as a way to tell the AdWords system that your advert should NOT be shown when this keyword is used, normally as part of a longer search string.

A mature campaign will have hundreds, if not thousands, of negative keywords but this takes time, comprehensive keyword research and a detailed analysis of your AdWords account data.

If you’d rather spend time managing other aspects of your business, you should review our AdWords management services and let us improve your return on investment.

At Impact Media we pride ourselves in helping our clients increase the return on their Internet marketing investment.

Of course there are many ways we accomplish this but even if you have no plans to out-source your pay per click management to a professional agency, there are still plenty of things that you could (should) be doing in order to help yourself and reduce the wasted clicks, aka cost, going though your AdWords account.

One of the most powerful, yet under-utilised, techniques to use is that of negative keywords. A negative keyword, what on earth is that? Well, simply put it’s a word or phrase that when used will prevent your advert from showing if used in conjunction with another word or phrase that appears in your campaign.

For example, let’s say you sell blue widgets and you’re using a combination of match types to get the maximum exposure for this product. However, your keyword research has thrown up that there is a lot of searches for ‘used blue widgets‘. In this example, you would add the word ‘used‘ as a negative.

Although important with both broad and phrase matches, with Google’s synonym replacement on broad matches, it is imperative that anybody running an AdWords campaign has performed thorough keyword research to identify as many negatives as possible. Failure to do so will mean a poorly performing campaign costing far more than it need.