Just got this email from John, a very astute Roundtable member (he was “Mr. Fishmonger” on my interview with four Intensive grads – MP3 is at http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/roundtable):
~~~
Perry,
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to increase my overall
search campaign CTR (which is +3%!) by continuously pausing the high
impression- low CTR keywords from my campaigns. I figured: OK, take out
the dogs that are not a good match for my market, and shoot for 6%, just
to see if I can do it.
What I have found is, I can’t do it, no matter how many .5% or less high
impression keywords I cut.
I am still in the 3-4% range.
My theory: Broad Match Keywords are the cause.
Since Google is loosening it’s standards, our broad match keywords are
showing up more and more to the unwashed masses, where they are less
relevant, in order for them to keep their click income up. It’s like they
are taking our search keyword campaigns, and throwing them into the
content network.
The more keywords you have in a broad match long tail, the easier it is
for Google to justify doing this.
I am going to pause my broad keywords completely in some of my campaigns
to test it.
Any other theories???
John
~~~
John,
I think that is a very sound theory actually. I should blog about this…. I can’t think of any other explanation.
Strategy, then:
Broad match in a separate ad group. Makes a lot of sense actually…..
Perry
~~~
Perry,
Early test results show that we were right. CTR is soaring on the exact
and phrase match words. Some broad match keywords have a very high CTR,
while the rest tank.
Google Broad Match = The new Content Network-rebranded, since they weren’t
able to make that fly the way they intended to.
Here’s to the poor unsuspecting fools out there who are making Google rich.
Talk to you later today…
John
~~~
So let me explain.
The big advertising spenders are spending less with Google. But Google can and will still hit their revenue targets by making adjustments to their ad formula.
The best way for them to do this is with BROAD MATCH keywords. All they have to do is tweak a number somewhere in their engine and ads will show up more easily for terms that don’t match.
So for example let’s say you sell red wagons.
Smart advertisers bid on
[red wagon] (exact match only)
“red wagon” (ad shows only for queries that contain this phrase)
red wagon (ad could show for “red toyota station wagon” or any number of other unrelated searches)
Then they watch conversion rates and adjust bids accordingly, to make sure their ROI is solid.
Most people just bid on
red wagon (broad match only)
And they get all those kinds of traffic mixed together.
So if Google lowers the quality threshold to get more exposures and clicks, they win and you lose – by getting lower quality traffic to your site.
I’m telling you, you’ve got to follow my system, and you’ve got to sleep with one eye open.
Now… let me tell you what this means for Google.
AdGooRoo.com monitors millions of search engine results and they are noting a 54% growth in Google’s “first page advertisers” – see http://www.adgooroo.com/blog/ for their full report. Google very well may be poised for a record quarter for Q4 2008. That’s what I’m predicting.
In any case, Google very much has control of their destiny. But you’d better make sure you’re on top of your conversion numbers!
About Managing your Ad Campaigns
For years I’ve been saying, managing Google campaigns is one of the hardest things to outsource. (It’s right up there with copywriting in that regard.) It looks like it should be easy, but those Google ads are sooooo close to your customers, it’s so intimately intertwined with your core marketing mission, it is VERY difficult to outsource this.
The only way to learn to play this game as a true expert is to learn on your own dime.
I got word from another Roundtable member, Jeff Hughes – he went through my very first Bobsled Run in 2005:
He says, “We are currently spending over $200,000/month per month profitably within just Adwords. We easily spend $50,000 per week.” Jeff has really cracked the code on PPC management and he teamed up with Glenn Livingston to form a PPC management company. They are the first company that I’ve ever been willing to publicly endorse for doing this absolutely mission-critical job for you.
If you think you’re too busy to master AdWords, think again. But if you HAVE achieved a level of mastery (that is a requirement by the way) and now you wish to have experts take over the controls, refine what you are doing and keep an eye on the meter for you, I suggest you schedule an interview with Glenn Livingston.
Stay Sharp.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: If you closely monitor YOUR AdWords campaigns and have observations / experiences about recent Quality Score and Broad Match thresholds, post your comments below. I would love to hear your experience.
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
36 Comments on “Observations & Predictions about Google, as of late December 2008”
Hi Perry,
That’s an insightful post. I’ve been using Adwords quite often ..setting campaign budget as I feel is a bit of experience on trial basis and bit by analyzing the trends. However target based campaigns really challenges me a lot and I would like some insight on the same :)
Thanks again
Suhasini
Thanks for the info and those comments posted. I’m relatively new in keyword research, mostly I used add-ons available in firefox to search out keyword or use google keyword tool without any idea at all what’s best to use…basically I just know the basics..not until this..thanks for sharing
Well I’m just trying to think about the dollars that Google took away by using tricks. I assume that all we who comment here are somewhat familiar with adwords. Can you imagine how many people are naively running adwords campaigns and have no idea about the tricks mentioned here!! Google is earning an enormous amount of money by deceiving adwords beginners!! I guess we should stick with exact matches and phrases!
Hello Rick,
I appreciate you sharing the results of your diligent research with regard to broad and exact match key words and phrases with regard to Google Adwords.
Many thanks, I will take immediate action.
I also agree with your conclusions: this cheap trick of Google’s at our expense is going to costs those two lads plenty!
Regards from Southern Germany
Joe Kennedy
Hi Perry
I’ve also noticed that broad phrase matching isn’t effective.
What’s really interesting about broad phrase matching is that it is even a waste for a one word keyword so that:
mykeyword
is MUCH less effective than
“mykeyword”
even if they are in practice the same thing!
This is because the mykeyword approach gets huge numbers of impressions but mostly of highly dubious quality – and a low CTR.
We operate PC marketing campaigns for other businesses but our prices are based on the business performance we actually achieve for our customers so we really care about every penny.
Peter
E: [email protected]
T: +44 20 8998 5728
ok I will give it a try!
Thank you
Georgette
Negative keywords can be broad matched, exact matched or phrase matched …..and some campaigns need hundreds of these if you are to target your audience precisely.
On a second note a high CTR is not always the same as effective …. think in terms conversion.
Georgette,
Negative keywords are always very specific to a situation. When you generate a keyword list from a place like Wordtracker or Google, you should look very carefully in that list for words that should be negative instead of positive.
Epiar has taken this to an art form and until the end of the year I’m offering a very special package that includes a 2 hour interview with a company that charges $10,000 to generate huge negative keyword lists – in some cases generating CTR’s of over 70% on broad match. Very impressive. The offer is at http://www.expertseries.adwordsstrategy.com. You get four expert series interviews and $600 of other stuff for $29.95, just for trying Renaissance Club. I got a lot of raves from the Epiar call, they gave away a lot of cool secrets for generating negative keywords. Give it a try –
Perry Marshall
In most cases I have refined my clients ads to re: exclude broad search (unless they have a high CTR)and it is the campaigns that have broad search keywords that have suddenly bombed. I think this tells a story and I will be ading more negative keywords at both campaign and ad level as I believe success lies as much with the negative words we use than with the positive!
well I tried eliminating broad keywords and I have had opposite happen….dropped percentage ctr…why do you think?
also what type of negative keywords are there(besides free) what are some examples or are they too specific to individual campaigns? if so, how can I find out or get help for what type of negative keywords I could apply to my campaign?
I run a number of client campaigns and have noticed a downturn in CTR in the last month. for example one client had an overall CTR of 3.12% in November (individual campaigns ranged from 0.92 – 16.31%) BUT this month the figures have dropped to an overall CTR of 1.94% (individual campaigns range from 0.23 to 12.76%).
Despite all I’ve been told about using the content network I have always advertised purely on the Google and Google powered search networks … but suddenly I’m finding some of my ads turning up on the Content pages!
In most cases I have refined my clients ads to exclude broad search (unless they have a high CTR)and it is the campaigns that have broad search keywords that have suddenly bombed. I think this tells a story and I will be ading more negative keywords at both campaign and ad level as I believe success lies as much with the negative words we use than with the positive!
Unfortunately, some of my clients PPC campaigns have broad match terms that convert very well for them, which makes it quite difficult to pause or delete. Yet, in the same campaign, others do not do well. Monitoring these broad match keywords and pausing them is the best approach for these types of clients.
In order to increase your quality score, not only do I write highly targeted ads and narrow ad groups, but extremely relevant source code SEO and on-page content make a huge difference in lowering their costs per click. I always opt to place my clients in positions 1, 2, and 3, since this is where 90% of their business comes from. When using previous PPC management companies, they would pay up to $2.50 for the 6th, 7th and 8th spot, and be very lucky to get 1 to 2 conversions per month. So you have to consider, would you rather pay up to $1 more per click and get an increase of conversions up to 700% or higher, or pay less and get relatively no conversions?
For those clients with a more modest budget, they get less keywords, and more local targeting (depending upon their market and geo/region). This does very well for them, even with broad match and generic terms.
I have tested quite a few campaigns and now uncheck Google’s Search Partners, and conversions are increasing, and the money is spent more wisely.
One more sneaky thing Google has implemented…they have added iPhone and mobile devices (not the laptop devices, I leave this checked on) as a default. Unless my client’s market is ringtowns or downloadable music or news, mobile surfers still do not have the mind set to purchase while they are on their cell phones. So there is no need to have my client’s currently pay to test this market for Google.
Thanks for the great article!
Regards,
Adrienne DeVita
Hi georgette,
it often makes sense to bid on the broad match because your ads get shown for various different keywords that you might not yet have come up with. you can add these keyword to the campaign then. also, i remember reading lately that google stated 50% of all daily search queries have never been searched before. in other words people often search for variations that you would never come up with.
contrary, working with broad match often also requires adding lots of negative keywords to the campaign..
James
why even bid on the broad match at all…is it to increase traffic? are their any advantages or plus side to it?
My brother and I have been applying the instrucions from he adgooroo book and call that you had Perry and we keep dropping those bids to lower our positon and you know our CTR keeps going up.
We also have noticed that starting separate small sites that are extremely narrowly focused are performing better with quality scores for us than adding pages to our main website. This is a bit of a pain at times but when we see a potential market for one of our products it is well worth the time since we were going to create multiple landing pages off of our main site anyway.
I just got surprised by this with one of my campaigns.
I started looking at the analytics and was getting tons of clicks from search phrases that didn’t even contain the key exact keywords I broad matched on.
Example..
Broad match: “SalesTips”
Google placement: “Insurance selling tips”
Google placement: “Sales”
Google placement: “Mobile phone sales”
I went and typed in the terms and was very surprised to see them running the ad under the very broad term “Sales”.
Of course, going to phrase and exact only rocketed both CTR and conversion.
some more thoughts:
besides the broad match option the whole gogle quality score is also quite a smart (and profitable) invention. i imagine when ppc started people were writing ads which were far from being CTR optimized. for google the CTR is one of the most important factors for their profits. by introducing the quality score advertisers were “forced” to optimize their ads for CTR. from google’s perspective this is of course the best way to monetize as much of the traffic as possible. a high CTR does not have anything to do with a good quality in my eyes. if google really cared about the ad quality they would use a mixture of CTR and conversion rates of the ads (i.e. for example a multiplication of the two factors and force advertisers to maximize this value).
however a higher conversion rate often also means a lower CTR so this is not really beneficial for google.
so in other words the quality score is a tool which allows google to increase the overall proportion of clicks which go to ppc ads instead of generic google results. people who write ads with a low CTR just pay more per click so in the end this also becomes profitable for google.
cheers
stefan
I saw this same scenrio hit my accounts in June. Number of impressions went up 30%, CTR dropped up to 3%, conversions costs went up 60%.
I handle other clients accounts too and it hit all of them in the next few weeks. I called and talked to several google reps and they provided the standard response of it must be our campaigns, it’s not us.
Like one of the responders above, I saw it more in the partners than on google search. I’ve turned off partners, that helped a lot on my accounts.
Google also has been changing the results according to personal search too. They are tracking individuals and providing what they think is more valid results based on search history. I can’t help but think this too has had an impact although I can’t support it yet with analysis.
I think that one of the reasons many of the really big advertisers have backed off is due to the changes. They shot themselves in the foot, only time will tell if the small guy accounts that they are pummeling will make up the difference. What they’ve done is force me and my clients to look for alternative ways to advertise.
Add in our world wide credit and economic impact and it looks like trouble for next quarter.
Perry … one thing which helps in managing the broad match algorithm that NO ONE DOES (seriously, out of 100+ reviews I’ve seen no one doing this) is to add deleted keywords into the adgroup they are deleted from as a NEGATIVE.
When people delete keywords from an adgroup which also has broad and/or phrase match, they’re really done ALMOST NOTHING to improve the overall click through in that group because
Google can go right on delivering the impressions on the deleted word as part of the broad or phrase match. You can suppress this with the negative addition.
(Kirt Christensen pointed this out originally)
Hi guys,
I agree that google is taking compelete advantage of their broad match option, which is why we have seperated our campaigns and placed our keywords in brackets [] for exact match. This has improved our CTR to just over 4% from less than 1% previously. However even though our campaigns have been successful with our high click through rate, this has failed to put us in any of the first 40 pages of googles organic free search engines. Casn any body offer an answer for this?
Wow Perry,
You are hitting the nail on the head today. I just decided to take a look at one of my better campaigns again today after reading here. Now, I justed Checked these Yesterday. I thought I would look back at Broad.
One work Keyword Scam, Yesterday had 12 hits on 8200 views. Today it has 878hits on 584,571 Views. Not only that, Yesterday Google told me that would not get much because it wasn’t on the first page unless I bumped it up to $1.25. So I did bump it up from .30 to .70 . Glad I didn’t listen to them. Oh ya, and it was ranked 3.1 spot at 70 cents.
Also, just checked out my tracking. NO LEADS from that keyword.
one last comment, Last week when I started a new campaign I forgot to pause my keywords before I was totally done with building it. I like to try not get any clicks from kids under 21, hadn’t clicked on that yet. I got 500 clicks in 2 hours and no leads on one .60 Cent Facebook keyword. Live and learn…
hey perry, hey john,
this is something i have been thinking about for a while too. i’ve been involved with ppc marketing since several years now.
in my eye’s google’s broad match option is the ultimate tool for increasing their profits when needed. by adjusting their algorithm for the broad match google is able to increase/decrease their profits whenever necessary. across all adwords campaign a small “widening” of the broad match will increase profits by a small amount for each campaign but will add up to huge sums overall. only a small amount of adwords users with a very high level of spending will notice a broader match option by means of lower conversion rates. it is therefore a very handy tool for google. also, small advertise are at the mercy of google since most of them don’t really use match types to their full potential.
besides these (negative) statemtents i can only endorse the invention of the match types for ppc marketing. the three different options are very intuitive and easy to use.
thats it for now, i’ll write some more stuff tomorrow.. just too tired now
Hi Perry & John,
I head the search marketing business at Ignitee (India) and we handle spends over $400k per month for dozens of clients.
I have been seeing this phenomenon for the last 8 months. That is when I wrote a short report called “Who Stole My Tail!”
Google being a business first, has changed gears majorly to ensure that we end up burning more clicks. From broad to expanded broad and even an attempt to expanded broad.
What’s worse it that Perry, even if you have a broad matched and an exact matched keyword, time and time again I say even for the “exact” search query, Google picks up your broad match and it cites the reason to be that your broad match has a better Quality Score. Humbug!
With things like “query passing” things even go more out of control and negative keywords are even more critical.
The result is that we have to spend an additional two hours per week on each campaign to ensure that we are not burning any dollars on irrelevant and so called “broad” clicks.
2 questions:
1. where is automatic matching feature located?
2. what if you are using Keyword Insertion…would this have any bearing at all on broad match or is this irrelevant?
I’ve just adjusted my campaign for the following keywords:
Buy a business with no money down
Buy a business creatively
and
zero down business
I’ve just made each of them exact match only and guess what ZERO drop off in conversions from clicks BUT my CPC has dropped by 64%!
Thank you Perry and team it is just a nother simple reminder to keep learning and keep implementing.
Neil Asher
http://www.neilasher.com/
“You can make money without doing evil.”
What happened to this simple statement Google proclaims? My company manages PPC campaigns and we have seen very liberal usage of broad match come into play. It has been so ridiculous with some terms that we don’t even use broad match in stand alone ad groups.
What really frustrates me is the fact that CTR affects quality score, which affects CPC. So Google uses liberal broad match, which make my CTR plummet which lowers my quality score which keeps my bid price high. That sounds evil to me.
“You can make money without doing evil.”
What happened to this simple statement Google proclaims? My company manages PPC campaigns and we have seen very liberal usage of broad match come into play. It has been so ridiculous with some terms that we don’t even use broad match in stand alone ad groups.
What really frustrates me is the fact that CTR affects quality score, which affects CPC. So Google uses liberal broad match, which make my CTR plummet which lowers my quality score which keeps my bid price high. That sounds evil to me.
Make sure you have Automatic Matching turned off. It is turned ON by default, and you must opt-out by unchecking the box. For many, automatic matching lowers CTR (by increasing impressions) and decreases conversion. It is probably responsible for the “partial match” clicks that Rick described where the keyword that triggered the ad is “broadly related” to the broad match keyword inside your ad group.
Here is how Google describes their Automatic Matching feature (which was enabled automatically in late Feb.-June). In early June, Google put a notice inside my Adwords account. You logged in, and you suddenly realized that you were advertising on keywords that you didn’t specifically include. Including keywords that didn’t convert. The notice inside my account (describing Automatic Matching) said:
For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site. Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget.”
Maybe this accounts for some of the issues with broad match.
I’m a professional programmer, and in the fall I ran a campaign for a short time which I think sheds some additional light on what might be happening.
I wrote my own relatively simple tracking system to keep track of traffic that ultimately went to an affiliate program. I was running ads in the search network, and I set up my ad to first hit an intermediate web page to capture some information and then it redirected to my actual landing page. To this intermediate page I passed the adgroup name, the matched keyword (I did NOT differentiate broad, phrase, and exact), an ad identifier I made up, and the Google Adwords internal ad_id. I also captured the referer information, which usually contained a “buried” but discernible copy of the search that had been done by the visitor.
While most clicks on my ads contained no surprises, there were some that caught my eye.
I noticed that some searches (I think all of them were from Google search network partners) contained search phrases that were related to my keyword phrase, but they did not contain all of the words in my keyword phrase. I had thought that broad match would always contain all the words in the keyword phrase I specified.
Here are some examples. The first one is a search into my Adwords ad that originated from AOL (see first example below). Looking at the referer information it is pretty obvious that the visitor searched for the phrase “ab exercises” (probably without the quotes), and it matched my keyword phrase “workouts ab”, probably as a broad match. Clearly the matching algorithm associated “exercises” with “workouts”. Is this what I wanted? Not really. I wanted more control.
I did not notice any traffic that came directly from a Google search with this same liberal approach to matching.
So perhaps partners in the Adwords search network are the source of searches that take a liberal approach to broad matches.
EXAMPLES
========
adgroup=>Workouts-Ab
keyword=>workouts ab
ad=>ad2
ad_id=>2434092981
referer=>http://aolsearcht7.search.aol.com/aol/search?query=ab+exercises&page=5&nt=SG5&s_cs=4905114522288504783&s_it=keyword_rollover&encquery=51cbaa424f87c1a5bd4bffb4a6164576&ie=UTF-8&invocationType=keyword_rollover
adgroup=>Workouts-Ab
keyword=>workouts ab
ad=>ad5
ad_id=>2444252811
referer=>http://search.aol.com/aol/search?invocationType=comsearch30&query=ab+routine&do=Search
adgroup=>Workouts-Ab
keyword=>workouts ab
ad=>ad5
ad_id=>2444252811
referer=>http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=exercises+for+abs
adgroup=>Workouts-Ab
keyword=>workouts ab
ad=>ad2
ad_id=>2434092981
referer=>http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2352&o=10181&l=dir&dm=&q=good%20ab%20exercise
adgroup=>Workouts-Ab
keyword=>workouts ab
ad=>ad2
ad_id=>2434092981
referer=>http://www.ask.com/web?q=Ab+Exercise&qsrc=6&o=0&l=zk
I’m on the other side – an adsense publisher and I can tell you that irrelevant adverts are getting more common. It’s really annoying because relevant adverts are actually a benefit to a page – google’s change of policy is counter-productive.
I run a good site with good content tightly focused and that attracts visitors but if they don’t click the ads I don’t earn so I can’t spend the time to produce the content – unless I charge admission!
What we (both publishers and advertisers) need is competition in the market.
Hi To Perry and All,
As a first-time poster on this Forum, apologies if this has been raised before but it dovetails perfectly with the current thread.
How many Adworders have noticed that the recent ‘Opportunities for Improvement’ section on Adwords is stuffed full of broad search phrases. Curious to see what effect implementing the changes would have on a couple of my Campaigns I tried the new Google suggestions for 1 week. CTR HALVED !!!!
The second nasty little feature of their ‘bright ideas’ is that any amendments have to be manually removed if ( or when) you notice that the CTR gets bad.
I’d therefore recommend that a very watchful eye is kept on the CTR of any campaign that has availed itself to the ‘Opportunity for Improvement’……in my opinion, it sucks !!
Seasons Greetings to All
Hi Perry,
I’m surprised that you weren’t aware of this before. “Mr. Fishmonger” is wrong in saying that “Google Broad Match = The new Content Network-rebranded”, it is actually called Expanded Broad Match and has been a problem for Adwords advertisers since Google (in their quest for more clicks and revenue) loosened their Broad Matching algorithm sometime in 2006.
Here’s Google’s official explanation of Expanded Broad Match:
“With expanded matching, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on highly relevant keywords, including synonyms, related phrases, and plurals, even if they aren’t in your keyword lists.”
(from MediaPost’s SearchInsider: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=59035)
There are other good articles about this:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003196.html (January 2006)
http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/adwords-expanded-broad-match-warning.php
http://searchquant.blogspot.com/2007/06/expanded-broad-match-taming-beast.html
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/adwords-keyword-matching-tips/319/
http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog/2008/01/08/stomp-the-google-adwords-expanded-broad-match-problem/
Hope those are useful…
This is an interesting post. I have been closely watching Google the past 4 months and have been concluding the same exact thing, but have yet to read anything about it.
Exact and Phrase keywords work well and you can get a great CTR with tight adgroups. But be very wary of the BROAD match. I dont like the concept. It is as if Google places your ad whereever they want and your ad will be triggered for crazy search queries.
I run a search query report every 3 days to see the actual keywords that trigger my ads. I am absolutely astounded by what Google deems relevant when using Broad keywords.
Using the Broad match scares me and I am very wary when using it. I monitor it very closely now. It definelty gets the most impressions, but the CTR usually tanks…but now I know why – Horrible Relevance.
I have restructured my adgroups. Adgroup A has the phrase and exact match. Adgroup B has the broad match.
Adgroup A gets a great CTR, low costs, and a great conversion. Adgroup B gets many impressions, low CTR and low conversion.
The problem is I see all the impressions and I really want to make Adgroup B work, but after looking at the search query reports – it will never work because of the crazy keywords that trigger this ad and poor relevance.
I agree with John. Broad Match = the new Content Network
Hi Perry,
I am surprised people are not bidding on each type in separate groups already.
This is the best way to partition off the CTR and optimize campaigns.
Regards
James
Hi Perry,
Re phrase and exact matching: This is a super post because it is an important core issue in my planning. I figured this out last year from reading your posts and a couple of phone consulting hours with you. This year all of my keywords are exact and phrase matches. My spend is 1/2 of last year. This savings isn’t science because of the economy but still I think significant as it relates to article.
Re outsourcing: I also agree with the comment that outsourcing needs careful thinking before acting. I talked with a couple of firms and I could tell in the introductory calls they would not know enough about my niche to help. My advice to someone thinking about this is to call and talk rather than exchange a bunch of emails. The first thing I discovered – it took about a week to get a return call. I thought problem right off the blocks and no thanks.
Happy Holidays,
Maury Davenport
Law Seminars, Inc.
Perry,
I agree completely with your and John’s observations on the broad match gone wild…
I use a product called TrafficAnalyzer that allows me to track every visitor to my site in great detail, and spend time backtracking each click at times to verify what Google is doing with my money.
More recently, I’m finding a many disturbing things that are causing us to reduce our spending on Google’s latest borderline behavior.
For example, we bid on broad match 3-keyword term such as “email marketing strategy” (without the quotes) and find:
1. We get “partial match” clicks, such as “marketing retail strategy” (it’s missing our keyword “email” altogether!)
2. We get “expanded match” on non-US Google search engines (e.g., google.uk) such as “marketing” (only one of our keywords used in the actual search)
3. We see “content network” looking matches on sites like business.com (pages full of nothing but ads, and no rhyme or reason for placement at all).
Couple this lack of accuracy with the outrageous cost per click with Google’s “first pad bid” rates for most keywords, it appears Google has gone off the deep end here.
There are plenty of companies who blindly blow big PPC budgets with Google, but as the rest of us look more closely at the crappy, untargeted traffic we’re actually getting these days (esp. with broad match), I have to believe Google may be running out of rabbits to pull out of their virtual hat to prop up their ad revenue in the sagging economy.
Google’s market leadership position is based upon their ad platform’s superiority, coupled with better search results, that (in the past) delivery better targeted results.
Google needs to be careful about putting lipstick on those other search engine pigs, as the market will figure it out and shift it’s ad investments elsewhere (we have).
Hi Perry
I’m probably a dabbler according to your latest newslettter. I read new things, have a little bit of success and then run into a problem that tends to derail the whole thing. However, being a roofer is a bit challenging lately, well maybe I’m just lazy.
But I’m trying to set up different landing pages for my google adwords account and all but the ads that go to the home page on my site get disapproved. So after reading your newsletter I decided I’m gonna be the one to constantly be writing to you with problems, since it’s time for the next level.
Thanks Perry, I always enjoy your writings
Steve Fisher
SunriseExteriors.com