How To Select Keywords For Google Adwords

Very often when selecting keywords and phrases for our clients and for our own Google Adwords campaigns, we are faced with a dilemma. While we want to keep traffic as targeted as possible, keep click-through rates and conversions as high as possible to maximise ROI, if we keep the list too targeted, traffic generated can be lower than what we would like. The obvious solution when an Adwords campaign is not generating the desired traffic is to go back to your keyword analysis and broaden the scope of the key-phrases that you include. Perhaps, change some phrases from exact match to broad match. However, if we broaden the list too much, we can go too far the other way and send lots of un-targeted traffic to our clients’ sites and so reduce ROI. So, how do we balance the desire for high volumes of traffic to our sites with requirement not to blow our clients’ budgets on keywords only loosely related to what they do?

I had a chat with my brother on this who works in Google as an account administrator and asked for his views. He said the best approach is as follows. Set up two campaigns. One is for the ultra-targeted key-phrases that you know will convert at high rates but generate relatively low volumes of traffic. The other campaign is for the more loose traffic. This traffic will convert at lower rates but can still generate positive ROI if watched closely. The reason for setting up the two campaigns is to “quarantine” the loose campaign so to speak. If these broad key-phrases were thrown in on top of the highly targeted key-phrases, they would devour the bulk of the budget. By having the two campaigns, we can ensure that we get maximum exposure for the highly targeted phrases and also allocate some of our budget to the looser ones in a separate campaign – this would seem to give us the best of both worlds. The analogy she used was of an army consisting of small amounts of highly trained commandos targeting high value targets such as generals as well as on the ground infantry fighting en mass on the front line. Nice analogy!!

If you need any help with from one of our Google Adwords Consultants, be sure to contact us and we will be delighted to help.