Track by Ads or Keywords First?

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blacktastic

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Dec 13, 2006
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I'm starting a campaign in a high-volume niche and have a choice on my tracking strategy since my tracking system won't do both at once.

1) Track keywords to find which convert the best

2) Since I have the keywords broken down pretty well into tight groups, I was also considering tracking by ad (which would in turn track by ad group as well). Usually I just do #1, but I've noticed sometimes my ad copy is "too good" in that the CTR is great, but my conversions suck. For this niche I'll need some aggressive ads so this should be monitored closely, and when just tracking via keyword I wouldn't know - too many ad groups to watch manually.

Yet another reason I was thinking doing #2 first is that there are many possible intents for my ad groups and I'm just not sure what the visitor's mindset is - thus I wanted to find winning ad groups by looking at the highest-traffic keywords to see if it is worth really digging into the long tail and firing up a ton of negatives (using phrase match at first).

Anyone have experience doing #2 then #1, or is that just stupid?
 


Both would be best...

Some keywords in combination with some ads work better than other combinations.

But if you had to choose one, tracking keywords would be better than tracking just plain ad groups/ads.
 
bluebobbo said:
Both would be best...

Some keywords in combination with some ads work better than other combinations.

But if you had to choose one, tracking keywords would be better than tracking just plain ad groups/ads.
Click to expand...

Anyone have a script that will do both? Everyone and their mother has them for sale (or oooff did one for free), but haven't seen anything on the ad side.
 
Check out my blog there's keyword tracking code on there. I believe it has the stuff for the adid as well. Although I don't usually track that. Consider every keyword + match type entirely different.

dog
dogs
[dog]
[dogs]
"dog"
"dogs"

are all totally different and each will give you different results. Track by the keyword because maybe [dogs] is a money maker and all the rest lose money. If you know [dogs] made money you could throw out the rest and have a profitable word. Where as tracking by adgroup all the others would have dragged the profitable one down and you'd have thrown then all away.
 
Track by keyword first. It'll help you weed out the unprofitable keywords, then you can worry about the ad text. When I start, I usually have 2 ad variations that are somewhat similar - the difference in ad copy shouldn't have a huge impact on your CR, but your keywords have a much more impact on CR.
 
blacktastic said:
Yeah, but how do you set the url in adwords for both the keyword and the ad at the same time? If I'm split testing some ads, I don't know which one they'll be serving up.
Click to expand...


domain.com/?ad=ad1&keyword={Keyword:default}

domain.com/?ad=ad2&keyword={Keyword:default}

ect..

setup a script to pull ad1 and keyword variables from your url

<?php echo $_GET["ad"]; ?>
<?php echo $_GET["keyword"]; ?>

then pass those on to your sponsor or whatever software you are using to parse the data
 
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