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I have finally pulled the trigger and paused all broad match keywords in my Google Adwords account. Notice, I said pause not delete. I am still a little hesitant.
Google AdWords Expanded Broad Match is good for Google but bad for advertisers. I was consistently showing a decrease in conversions on broad match terms, while showing an increase in cost. If anyone has followed any of my posts before, knows that I am a stern believer in conversion over clicks.
There were some obvious changes because of this pausing of broad keywords. Clicks and impressions have obviously all gone done immediately. And yes, conversions have gone down. But I am fine with that. Because proportionally speaking, it was a small decrease. I am willing to sacrifice a handful of conversions, if I can get a better return on as spend.
However, I do expect conversions and click to go back up soon. I plan to expand my keyword list with various long tail terms. This should greatly decrease my cost per conversion as well. Also, by eliminating broad match terms, I expect my ads will be more targeted. More targeted ads lead to a higher cost-per-click.
Thus, in theory, my quality score will go up and my ads will get ranked higher. Sounds right to me.
I will continue to monitor and see if there is any negative impact on overall revenue.
** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/
Hey Manoj,
If you let broad match run and setup your analytics to report on the actual search query, not just the purchased keyword, you’ll have a list of search queries that you can mine for long tail terms and candidates for negatives.
By comparing this with associated on site activity, this should let you more finely target your PPC campaigns.
-Alex
Thanks for the tip Alex, I’ll pass it on to John Ellis (who wrote the article).
Alex,
Thanks for the advice. I plan to do explore keywords from analytics over the next few weeks.
I agree with you, long tail is the answer.
Thanks again,
John Ellis
Nice post. Two thoughts:
1) I’ve adopted a strategy of keeping broad matches but setting the bids far lower than phrase and exact. As I find good keywords in the logs, I’ll add them in as exact or phrase matches, with higher bids. Deleting all broad matches might not be the best solution.
2) The author writes “Thus, in theory, my quality score will go up and my ads will get ranked higher.” I don’t think expanded broad matches factor into the Quality Score. See this AdWords help page:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6137
Note this text: “Also, your ads’ performance on keyword variations doesn’t influence your keywords’ Quality Scores, minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids, and ad positions.”