Reverse Logic in Google Adwords

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There’s a lot of jumbled information on Google Adwords. I’ve recently been trying to clear this up in a series of free videos I’ll be telling you about soon.

For now though, I want to tell you about a really important discovery – one that will go against the beliefs most businesses (and some Adwords professionals) hold about Adwords.

“Back in the day”, the key to Adwords success was to get thousands of long tail keywords – with all kinds or weird variations or mis-spellings – and bid pennies on them.

This did work a few years ago, but Google has got a lot smarter since then and this strategy no longer works in the cast majority of markets.

Why?

There are two reasons:

1. The most talked about one is the ‘Google Slap’ (or Slaps). I won’t go into great detail about it here as it has been extensively covered on blogs and forums all over the internet. The brief executive summary is Google started penalizing its advertisers with very high minimum bid prices if their Ad or Landing page didn’t meet Googles quality score. To get a good quality score (and therefore decent minimum bid price), your Ad and Landing page had to be relevant to the keyword you were bidding on. This, literally overnight, stopped advertisers getting a huge bundle of keywords, slapping up one generic ad, then send the traffic to one low quality landing page.

2. The second, and more recent change Google has made is regarding how it shows ads for broad match keywords (For a definition of broad match, see the bottom of this post.). Before this change, Google didn’t show broad match ads for close mis-spellings of the word. This meant that you could quite happily bid on all kinds of mis-spellings of a keyword and get some nice cheap clicks. Google’s change has put a stop to this and now shows correctly spelling broad match ads on the mis-spelled keyword. Confused? So was I. Here’s an example to clarify.

Click here to view the entire image.

So as you can see, even though I searched for ”siatica”, Google displayed ads that matched the keyword “sciatica”.

Therefore, if you were to bid on mis-spellings of a keyword, you’ll be bidding against the advertisers who are bidding on the correct spelling. This drives the bid price up and kind of defeats the object of bidding in mis-spelled keywords in the first place.

Now I’m not saying not to bid on mis-spelled keywords altogether. There are some instances where it can be done and be profitable. There is just a bit of tweaking and trickery to make sure the above doesn’t happen to your keywords.

You may now be thinking “What does work on Adwords these days?”

Fair question and the answer is not what you’d expect. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post, but to give you a clue, it’s totally counter intuitive and involves “slapping yourself”.

Speak to you soon…

George.

Broad match definition:

Taken from: http://www.google.com/ads/glossary.html

Broad match. This is the default option. When you include keyword phrases – such as tennis shoes – in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order – and possibly along with other terms.

Your ads may also automatically show for expanded matches, including synonyms and plurals. This means that Google will analyze your keyword list, ad text, and millions of daily Google search queries, and show your ads for relevant terms and variations (such as tennis sneakers), even if you didn’t include these terms in your keyword list.

Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches. If you decide to run your ads on broad-matched keywords, we recommend creating keyword phrases containing at least two descriptive words.