PPC Keywords - how many to start?

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BlondeTM

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I am just starting affiliate marketing, and I'm working on keywords in adwords.

I have 20 phrases, which I am breaking down into lists of 20 related phrases for each one. My total keyword list is 400. Should I plug all 400 phrases into google at once? Throw it all at the wall and see what sticks? Or should I start smaller? Is one way easier to manage than the other (mainly because I don't understand the tracking fully)?

All the phrases are for one product if that matters.
 


If you're detected adding that many words within that short amount of time you're gonna get hit with the quality score. No more than 1 keyword per month.
 
If you're just starting out you're probably going to run into quality score issues. QS was a big PITA for me when I got started.

I just read a pretty good post about it on Aequitas's blog.

You really need to cut them down into adgroups of no more than 25 or so keywords to keep them targeted and keep the QS up.

If you don't have it already, adwords editor is a nice tool to help out when you're separating keywords and writing ads.
 
Try starting out with your most targetted keywords and get them to convert. Then start expanding into some other shit.
 
I've done campaigns with one keyword in an adgroup, my qs was very good, but everything lined up nicely. It took awhile, but with the editor now it wouldn't be too bad. I've also done adgroups with 50 keywords and noticed that maybe 15 would be active.

It seems that the smaller and tighter your adgroups, the happier the adwords system is with you.
 
I narrowed it down to the most targeted keywords, and read Aequitas's blog to get a feel for the QS. I have 15 phrases I'll use, then as time goes on I can try out different campaigns with the other keywords.

This seems so much more manageable now, thanks for the help!
 
I'm new as well, but I use thousands of keywords since I have no idea what anybody is going to search with, I divide them into their own campaigns as much as possible but there is still a few hundred in each campaign, then I lower the bid so I'm not paying as much per click. I'll do all kinds of variations of the same keyword, misspellings etc..

My quality index this way is higher than what it is with less keywords, ofcourse it's only at 2. I don't have a landing page, I send traffic directly to the offer.

If I have a lower quality index, does that mean I'm not going to be as high up in the search listings?


Thanks
 
Hi there,

I've just joined this forum and i must admit i'm a bit surprised at some of the advice you have been given so far. I'm a PPC specialist but dabbling in affiliates just now.

As to your question, 400 keywords is not a lot to have. The number of keywords you have in your campaign DOES NOT affect your QS. What will decrease your QS is irrelevant keywords and bad ad text. What i would suggest you do is, break your keywords into different adgroups, it is vital you make sure all your keywords are relevant to your site, include misspellings and plurals. Unfortunately, Google doesn't pick these up unless you have it as a keyword. As for ad text, make it clear what your site is all about and put some form of call-to-action in there e.g find out more, enquiry online. That kind of thing but be careful, Google have quite strict editorial guidelines.

The good thing about running a PPC campaign is that it's partly about trial and error. Initially i would put all 400 keywords up. As your campaign kicks off you can see what keywords are converting, which ones are just not getting any clicks and which ones are costing you money with no return. Thereafter you can refine your list and change them accordingly.

Hope this info helps
 
iac said:
Hi there,

I've just joined this forum and i must admit i'm a bit surprised at some of the advice you have been given so far. I'm a PPC specialist but dabbling in affiliates just now.

As to your question, 400 keywords is not a lot to have. The number of keywords you have in your campaign DOES NOT affect your QS. What will decrease your QS is irrelevant keywords and bad ad text. What i would suggest you do is, break your keywords into different adgroups, it is vital you make sure all your keywords are relevant to your site, include misspellings and plurals. Unfortunately, Google doesn't pick these up unless you have it as a keyword. As for ad text, make it clear what your site is all about and put some form of call-to-action in there e.g find out more, enquiry online. That kind of thing but be careful, Google have quite strict editorial guidelines.

The good thing about running a PPC campaign is that it's partly about trial and error. Initially i would put all 400 keywords up. As your campaign kicks off you can see what keywords are converting, which ones are just not getting any clicks and which ones are costing you money with no return. Thereafter you can refine your list and change them accordingly.

Hope this info helps
Click to expand...

If your such a specialist how did you manage to fuck up something as easy as making your first forum post on WF?
 
beejeebers said:
Do not dump 400 keywords into one adgroup to start. Your campaign will never get off the ground. I don't care what any "ppc specialist" says.
Click to expand...


I'm not going to. After setting that up, and floundering around trying to just find the keyword list once it was all done convinced me that I need to keep this manageable. Patience is definitely not one of my better qualities, but I'm going to force myself to learn this the right way.
 
I don't understand how having less keywords is more effective, especially with targeted keywords, the way I see it as if there are more keywords there's more of a possiblity of somebody finding your site.

example:

instead of just using the keyword: dating for an online dating site and narrowing down to:

dating online
online dating site
find a date online.

When you start targeting, you're going to end up with more keywords correct? I don't know, I'm new so if somebody could explain this to me correctly I'd appreciate it. Does it have to do with budget? I'm on a low budget so I use targeted keywords to get a lower bid. If I had money obviously bid on competitive keywords and wouldn't have to has as many.

Thanks
 
Well, so far my words suck.

The phrases that have the great quality score are averaging $3-$5 to be in the top 3 positions. I'm in like....8 billionth position for those ones.The ones with the ok score are also in crappy positions, even though they put my bid at .05 for those.

The total number of searches per month based on the keywords I chose is 9,000. I have had 3 impressions served today.

So, I have a few choices (and I have no clue what to do, and yeah I know I need to be patient so I won't include that one) :

1) Bid higher (I'm on a tight budget, so it can't be that much higher so it won't push the position up that much)

2) Create more relevant ads (my ad is more shock value than targeted)

3) Go after different terms.

4) Try the same thing in MSN adcenter and compare the two

The weird thing is...I put the landing page up four days ago. It's on page four of Google for that term. But for the same term, my ad is on page 985,362.

Google makes me crazy.
 
scottspfd82 said:
If you're just starting out you're probably going to run into quality score issues. QS was a big PITA for me when I got started.

I just read a pretty good post about it on Aequitas's blog.

You really need to cut them down into adgroups of no more than 25 or so keywords to keep them targeted and keep the QS up.

If you don't have it already, adwords editor is a nice tool to help out when you're separating keywords and writing ads.
Click to expand...

I am an idiot.

I reread this thread again. When I set adwords up, I created only one adgroup with 25 words. That's what I need to do, create more adgroups. Oy vey.
 
BlondeTM said:
That's what I need to do, create more adgroups.
Click to expand...
Use the AdWords Editor for this, it's a major time saver. You can write a few queries to dump out the text to use the 'bulk' features of this tool.

And regarding QS, here's a few things that will help, although much of it is just a regurgitation of stuff you can find elsewhere on WF:
  • Longtail keywords. Use 3 or more (more is better) word keyphrases (little magic blue widgets)
  • Browsing vs. buying keywords. The word 'buy' itself is obvious, but think of others that are geared more toward someone with credit card in hand, rather than a wank who's "just browsing" or just plain 'not buying' Things like review, compare, free are not buy keywords (but are good negatives...see more below)
  • 'Manually' group keywords into AdGroups, picking one (or two) keywords for each. Ad this keyword to the end of your Display URL (example.com/BlueWidgets) Use only 5-15 keywords per AdGroup. If you've got more than this, segment it further.
  • Use dynamic text for the ad Headline (and perhaps one of the other lines). It's just {KeyWord:My Default Text Widgets} Use this same one keyword in the default text. And write multiple ads for each ad group (2 or 3 is fine). In my experience Proper Case (each word capitalized) works best, but do your own testing.
  • Learn to love PHP. For your destination URL, use something like this: example.com/mylandingpage.php?kw=my+many+word+keyphrase+here Then, on the landing page, include this code: <?php echo $_GET['kw']; ?> Put it in the meta tags and then two more times in the body, once in H1 tags for good measure. This will display the *exact* keyphrase in your landing page, automagically.
  • Use Exact and Phrase match only, to start. Since you're on a budget.
  • When you're ready to move into broad match, get *lots* of negative keywords. This is a very manual process and gathering them depends on the niche, but if it's a 'common product' you can get tons of negatives by searching for that product on eBay and Amazon (and anywhere else really). Look at what comes up, pull out your negative keywords from there. Then, once you have your hand compiled list of negs, dump them into one of the many keyword tools available and watch your list grow even bigger. I've amassed a list of 600 negatives for a campaign this way. And watch your logs! Although you've paid for the bunk clicks by this point, you can find some more that you would never have thought of otherwise.
  • Content is King. So, have plenty of good *unique* content. The PHP code above will help some, but you still need relevant content around this.
  • CTR is the King's bitch. Work on good CTR, which is based mostly on writing good ads. And remember, if the exact keyword used in the search appears in your ad, it will be bold which generally catches more clicks. This is all mostly trial and error, but you can always just study up on copywriting. An fun (but arguably useless) tool is: Advanced Marketing Institute - Headline Analyzer which rates your ad copy headlines.
  • Test your landing pages. Google has the Website Optimizer (beta) - AdWords - Google which might still be invite only. It's a pretty nice, multivariate tester that allows you to test several changes at once, while dynamically serving different combinations of the changes to each visitor.
  • Get backlinks. This is a longer term strategy, but it also will help to lower your PPC costs, while also increasing potential for free organic traffic.
Okay, this is turning into fucking long post and that's just off the top of my head. And remember, with the AdWords Editor and a few DB queries it is incredibly easy to setup.
 
Usually people write posts up in a text editor than paste it in here. So it gives shitty formatting
 
There is a feature in the Google Adword editor that I've never seen discussed. The editor can automatically create ad groups for you.

Look under Tools/Keywords Grouper in the menu.
Say you have 200 or 400 keywords into a campaign and if you don't want to manually break it up into separate adgroups. Use the keywords grouper after you input the keywords and the editor will tell you how it thinks the groups should be made and create them for you.

You can either accept the choices or use the suggestions as a starting point for further tweaking. It can save you some time.
 
I downloaded the adwords editor yesterday and it still isn't letting me log in. It says that either the account doesn't exist or I don't have permission to modify it. I have no trouble logging in through google though. I emailed them, but in the meantime I'm going to do some of these suggestions manually until I can use it to implement the other suggestions. I'd love to be able to have it automatically create ad groups.

You guys are awesome, thanks!
 
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