Andy Black
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The Single Biggest Reason People Lose Money With AdWords
With paid search, you win when you give people what they are already looking for.
An Example
When someone searches for “dublin plumbers”:
Your ad should echo back what they searched:
And so should your landing page:
Your Mistake
You probably call what people type into Google a “keyword”.
In this case, you would say that the keyword was dublin plumbers.
That’s ok… if you’re doing keyword research or search engine optimisation.
But if you are doing AdWords,
In AdWords, what people type into Google is called a “search term”.
In this case, the search term was dublin plumbers.
In AdWords paid search, a “keyword” is what we bid on, and it can match a *set* of search terms.
The only time that a keyword is the same as a search term is when we’re using exact match keywords, and have the campaign settings to disallow plurals and close variants.
Keywords match SETS of search terms:
Why It's Killing You
One of the main reasons people fail with AdWords paid search is that they use too much broad match.
By bidding in broad match, our ad for Dublin Plumbers can show for people searching for plumbers in locations within Dublin, e.g. “rathmines plumbers” or “blackrock plumbers”.
To these searchers, our ad is quite relevant, but not as relevant as ads for “Rathmines Plumbers” and “Blackrock Plumbers”.
Everyone knows this intuitively, but they sabotage themselves by using too much broad match, and having too many keywords per adgroup.
When you bid on a broad or phrase match keyword, you don’t know exactly what search terms Google will show your ad for.
You therefore don’t know if you have the best ad possible for that search term.
And the best landing page.
What You Need To Do
To win at lead generation with AdWords paid search, you need to ensure that your search term, ad, and landing page work as one unit, in harmony.
The ad needs to be relevant to the search term, and echo back the words in the search term.
Looking for the best results on the Google search page is a painful experience. People just want to find what they are looking for, and are scanning the page quickly to find the most relevant results.
Google knows that people scan rather than read each sentence fully, and even bold the words in the search term:
So you ideally echo back the words in the search term in the ad headline, and in the body of the ad.
If you get someone to click on your ad, then you need to quickly let them know that they are in the right place when they hit your landing page.
This is going to be performed with a big headline that also echoes back words in the search term.
If your landing page isn’t relevant, then the visitor will click the back button and you’ve just wasted money buying their click.
A Wide Funnel
If you are bidding on keyword dublin plumbers in broad match, then you’ve got a wide neck at the top of your funnel.
Your ad can appear for many different search terms, some intended and some unintended.
The top of your wide AdWords funnel:
Your ad is showing for lots of unintended searches.
You’re not going to get any work from people looking for search term plumber jobs dublin. You are wasting money on clicks for people using this search term.
You’re also not going to get any work from people looking for search term plumbing supplies, since they are probably other plumbers, or people who want to fix their own problems. Again, you are probably wasting money on clicks for people using this search term.
You cover the areas Rathmines and Blackrock within Dublin, but your ad CTR is not going to be as good as if your ad specifically mentioned those areas.
And your ad likely shows for many different search terms that are even less relevant and are just increasing your impressions and reducing your ad CTR.
If you ad CTR is lower than your competitors, then your cost per click (CPC) will start rising, and your impression share will start falling.
Meaning your ads show less often, you get less clicks, and each click costs you more.
Oh, and your landing page won’t convert as well since people were searching for lots of things other than “Dublin Plumbing Services”.
Many of these visitors are just going to hit the back button, so you have wasted money.
Which means your cost-per-conversion is climbing, so you have to reduce your bid prices to remain profitable.
Which means you lose traffic, until you get none at all, and your AdWords campaign has crashed and burned.
Lots of Narrow Funnels
The alternative is to create many small funnels that only show for search terms you want to show for, and where your ad is hyper relevant, and where your landing page promises them what they are looking for.
The top of your narrow AdWords funnels:
You now don’t have unwanted impressions or clicks from searches that are unrelated.
This improves your CTR, and reduces wasted spend.
Your ads are now much more relevant because they are tailored to each search term.
So your overall CTR improves even more.
If you can perform better than your competitors, then Google will reward you with a lower cost-per-click, and a higher impression share.
So your ads are showing more often, more people are clicking on them, and each click is costing less.
Your conversion rates improve since you’re now sending people to a landing page offering what they were looking for.
So your conversions increase, and your cost-per-conversion drops.
You can increase your bids and get exponentially more traffic. (Doubling your bid price typically results in 4x your click volume, so doubling your conversion rate can result in 8x your click volume.)
Your campaign is now up and running, and it’s a case of getting into a continuous cycle of optimising ad CTR, landing page conversion rates, repeat business and referral rates.
Ultimately, you are trying to increase your visitor life time value.
And every time you do it, you increase up your bids and your ads rise in position.
Volumes increase each time you increase your bids and conversion rates, and your campaign is going through the roof, instead of through the floor.
AdWords paid search can be real knife edge stuff.
New campaigns can keep dying off, no matter how much you push your bids.
But if you get it right, your campaign can hum and you can get into your continuous cycle of improvement.
Conclusion
When you’re using AdWords for paid search, stop calling what people typed in a “keyword”.
A keyword is what you bid on, and a search term is what they typed in.
Understand that when you bid on anything but exact match keywords, you are bidding on sets of search terms, and a lot of them are unintended, and a lot of them could have better ads.
Stop bidding on keywords, and bid on search terms instead.
This means that you bid in exact match (and set the campaign parameter to not allow close variants).
This will keep you out of trouble if you are getting started.
And is the start of optimising if you are already running.
If you can, create a separate ad group for each search term.
Be extremely careful of broad and phrase match keywords, as you are giving Google permission to show your ad for many different search terms.
Using broad and phrase match also gives Google permission to send your traffic to a choice of different ad groups within your campaigns. This can cloud any analysis you are trying to do, and can have unintended results when you amend bids or ad copy.
There is a place for broad and phrase match keywords, and for lead generation it’s mostly to find more search terms to bid on.
With the one-exact-match-keyword-per-adgroup structure, you’ll not only increase your ad CTR and conversion rates, but you’ll also be sending your traffic to the ads and landing pages you intended to send it to.
----------
Want to go further down the rabbit hole?
Read the next post.
With paid search, you win when you give people what they are already looking for.
An Example
When someone searches for “dublin plumbers”:
Your ad should echo back what they searched:
And so should your landing page:
Your Mistake
You probably call what people type into Google a “keyword”.
In this case, you would say that the keyword was dublin plumbers.
That’s ok… if you’re doing keyword research or search engine optimisation.
But if you are doing AdWords,
Calling what people typed into Google a “keyword” is probably
the single biggest reason you’re losing money with AdWords.
the single biggest reason you’re losing money with AdWords.
In AdWords, what people type into Google is called a “search term”.
In this case, the search term was dublin plumbers.
In AdWords paid search, a “keyword” is what we bid on, and it can match a *set* of search terms.
The only time that a keyword is the same as a search term is when we’re using exact match keywords, and have the campaign settings to disallow plurals and close variants.
Keywords match SETS of search terms:
Why It's Killing You
One of the main reasons people fail with AdWords paid search is that they use too much broad match.
By bidding in broad match, our ad for Dublin Plumbers can show for people searching for plumbers in locations within Dublin, e.g. “rathmines plumbers” or “blackrock plumbers”.
To these searchers, our ad is quite relevant, but not as relevant as ads for “Rathmines Plumbers” and “Blackrock Plumbers”.
Everyone knows this intuitively, but they sabotage themselves by using too much broad match, and having too many keywords per adgroup.
When you bid on a broad or phrase match keyword, you don’t know exactly what search terms Google will show your ad for.
You therefore don’t know if you have the best ad possible for that search term.
And the best landing page.
What You Need To Do
To win at lead generation with AdWords paid search, you need to ensure that your search term, ad, and landing page work as one unit, in harmony.
The ad needs to be relevant to the search term, and echo back the words in the search term.
Looking for the best results on the Google search page is a painful experience. People just want to find what they are looking for, and are scanning the page quickly to find the most relevant results.
Google knows that people scan rather than read each sentence fully, and even bold the words in the search term:
So you ideally echo back the words in the search term in the ad headline, and in the body of the ad.
If you get someone to click on your ad, then you need to quickly let them know that they are in the right place when they hit your landing page.
This is going to be performed with a big headline that also echoes back words in the search term.
If your landing page isn’t relevant, then the visitor will click the back button and you’ve just wasted money buying their click.
A Wide Funnel
If you are bidding on keyword dublin plumbers in broad match, then you’ve got a wide neck at the top of your funnel.
Your ad can appear for many different search terms, some intended and some unintended.
The top of your wide AdWords funnel:
Your ad is showing for lots of unintended searches.
You’re not going to get any work from people looking for search term plumber jobs dublin. You are wasting money on clicks for people using this search term.
You’re also not going to get any work from people looking for search term plumbing supplies, since they are probably other plumbers, or people who want to fix their own problems. Again, you are probably wasting money on clicks for people using this search term.
You cover the areas Rathmines and Blackrock within Dublin, but your ad CTR is not going to be as good as if your ad specifically mentioned those areas.
And your ad likely shows for many different search terms that are even less relevant and are just increasing your impressions and reducing your ad CTR.
If you ad CTR is lower than your competitors, then your cost per click (CPC) will start rising, and your impression share will start falling.
Meaning your ads show less often, you get less clicks, and each click costs you more.
Oh, and your landing page won’t convert as well since people were searching for lots of things other than “Dublin Plumbing Services”.
Many of these visitors are just going to hit the back button, so you have wasted money.
Which means your cost-per-conversion is climbing, so you have to reduce your bid prices to remain profitable.
Which means you lose traffic, until you get none at all, and your AdWords campaign has crashed and burned.
Lots of Narrow Funnels
The alternative is to create many small funnels that only show for search terms you want to show for, and where your ad is hyper relevant, and where your landing page promises them what they are looking for.
The top of your narrow AdWords funnels:
You now don’t have unwanted impressions or clicks from searches that are unrelated.
This improves your CTR, and reduces wasted spend.
Your ads are now much more relevant because they are tailored to each search term.
So your overall CTR improves even more.
If you can perform better than your competitors, then Google will reward you with a lower cost-per-click, and a higher impression share.
So your ads are showing more often, more people are clicking on them, and each click is costing less.
Your conversion rates improve since you’re now sending people to a landing page offering what they were looking for.
So your conversions increase, and your cost-per-conversion drops.
You can increase your bids and get exponentially more traffic. (Doubling your bid price typically results in 4x your click volume, so doubling your conversion rate can result in 8x your click volume.)
Your campaign is now up and running, and it’s a case of getting into a continuous cycle of optimising ad CTR, landing page conversion rates, repeat business and referral rates.
Ultimately, you are trying to increase your visitor life time value.
And every time you do it, you increase up your bids and your ads rise in position.
Volumes increase each time you increase your bids and conversion rates, and your campaign is going through the roof, instead of through the floor.
AdWords paid search can be real knife edge stuff.
New campaigns can keep dying off, no matter how much you push your bids.
But if you get it right, your campaign can hum and you can get into your continuous cycle of improvement.
Conclusion
When you’re using AdWords for paid search, stop calling what people typed in a “keyword”.
A keyword is what you bid on, and a search term is what they typed in.
Understand that when you bid on anything but exact match keywords, you are bidding on sets of search terms, and a lot of them are unintended, and a lot of them could have better ads.
Stop bidding on keywords, and bid on search terms instead.
This means that you bid in exact match (and set the campaign parameter to not allow close variants).
This will keep you out of trouble if you are getting started.
And is the start of optimising if you are already running.
If you can, create a separate ad group for each search term.
Be extremely careful of broad and phrase match keywords, as you are giving Google permission to show your ad for many different search terms.
Using broad and phrase match also gives Google permission to send your traffic to a choice of different ad groups within your campaigns. This can cloud any analysis you are trying to do, and can have unintended results when you amend bids or ad copy.
There is a place for broad and phrase match keywords, and for lead generation it’s mostly to find more search terms to bid on.
With the one-exact-match-keyword-per-adgroup structure, you’ll not only increase your ad CTR and conversion rates, but you’ll also be sending your traffic to the ads and landing pages you intended to send it to.
----------
Want to go further down the rabbit hole?
Read the next post.
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Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)
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