Newly discovered secrets about how the engines serve your ads

By Adam Goldberg

Each search engine allows you to select a variety of match types for your keywords. Google and MSN provide three match type options: Exact, Phrase, and Broad; whereas Yahoo offers Standard and Advanced match. Most search marketers equate Yahoo’s advanced match to be a combination of Google and MSN’s phrase and broad match.

We believe that depending on their campaign objectives and goals, search engine marketers should make use of all available match types the engines provide. However, if you use phrase, broad, or advanced matching options, you open yourself up to several potential risks, some that are apparent and others that are not.

The most obvious risk is that the search engines can show your ads when they deem that a search is related closely enough to your keyword(s).  Search engines are not perfect and sometimes end up showing ads for searches that may or may not be relevant to the keyword in the pay-per-click account.  In order to combat this, search engine marketers use negative keywords.  For example, a company that sells windows for a home or business and has the keyword “windows” as a phrase, broad, or advanced match, would likely negative the word ‘Microsoft’ so their ads do not show up when someone is looking for Microsoft Windows.

Another possible risk of using broad, phrase or advanced match keywords occurs when a user’s search phase can possibly trigger more than one keyword and advertisement in more than one ad group or campaign. Due to this competition between campaigns, advertisers lose control of the landing experience they want to provide for a potential customer.  This is what one of my colleagues at ClearSaleing coined “Ad Group Purity.”

Here’s an example:  Consider an online retailer selling apparel and gear made by the Columbia brand. This retailer might have three different ad groups which contain broad match keywords, each with their own landing page experience, for “Columbia,” “Columbia Clothing,” and “Columbia Backpacks.”  The “Columbia” ad group directs users to a landing page featuring a wide variety of Columbia’s products, the “Columbia Clothing” ad group directs users to a page featuring only apparel made by Columbia, and the “Columbia Backpacks” ad group directs users to a page featuring the different models of backpacks made by Columbia. Each ad group is intended to direct specific searches to specific landing pages with the goal of improving user experience and ultimately increasing profitability for the retailer.

Let’s say a customer now visits their favorite search engine and enters a search for “Columbia Backpack.”  Because all three groups contain broad match keywords, the engine can theoretically match this search with a keyword within any of the three ad groups mentioned above, serving three different ads and three different landing page experiences. But is this just theory? The search engine should know that because this person specified ‘backpack’ in their search, it needs to trigger an ad from the backpack ad group, right?

Not always.

Using our technology, advertisers are able to see the exact search term a user entered into the search engine and pair it with the keyword and ad the engine ended up serving for the query. With this reporting, we have seen the keyword “Columbia Backpack” does indeed trigger keywords in all three of the ad groups above.  Once we discovered this, we realized that in order to keep our ad groups ‘pure’, and thus more profitable, we had to use negative keywords in another way.

For this example, our retailer should attempt to filter out the more specific “clothing and “backpack” traffic from the “Columbia” branded ad group (since they have more targeted ads in other groups) by inserting negative keywords such as “clothing” and “backpacks”.  In the “Columbia Clothing” campaign they should insert the negative keyword word “backpack”, and in the “Columbia Backpack” ad group they should insert the negative keyword “clothing.”  This use of negatives will ensure that the keyword, advertisement, and landing page shown to the customer all line up with their intentions as dictated by their search phrase, increasing the ROI of this marketing campaign.

While we don’t claim to understand the complexity of a search engine’s algorithm and its pay-per-click ad serving engine, we do know that leaving broad match keywords in their hands does not always produce results which are in the advertiser’s best interest. Knowing this and protecting your ad group purity through proper negative keyword usage will help improve your business’s profitability.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under All Blogs, PPC, Uncategorized, What's New?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.