I have been searching for days to no avail, but after reading many posts on this forum I truly expect to get some good answers to my novice questions. Since I haven’t been able to locate this information I’m hoping answers to this post will help many others too.
I have had reasonable success setting up my Adwords campaigns and adgroups, but I am having difficulty understanding how to use combinations of broad, phrase, and exact match to keep keywords from conflicting. I keep getting this error message:
>Your ad isn't being shown for this keyword because there may be other ads within this ad group that are ranked higher.<
I have probably way over-thought my keyword selections without understanding what, exactly, I was doing. Over the past few weeks I have developed thousand of keywords, in hundreds of adgroups, in a dozen campaigns. Originally they were all set to broad match. I have since set all my keywords to phrase match with much better results, but am still getting many conflicts.
BTW my first ad entry got an EXCELLENT quality score, so my ad text and landing pages must be fairly good (I’m sure there is always room for improvement later), but that has dropped to OK or inactive as I have added campaigns, adgroups, and keywords. My bids are relatively low at .20 and .30, so I know I can activate keywords and probably raise quality score with higher bids. I do think the conflicting keywords are causing a lower QS as the required CPC has gone up since I started. I know I’m bidding way to low on the generic terms because my ad is being displayed on the 5th to 20th page, but that is okay for now. I’m just testing the waters.
I know that some of my keywords should probably remain broad match and many should probably be exact match, but I’m not sure which or which will be the most effective. Like anyone, I want nickel bids for the search results with no, or few, other ads.
There are many keywords which work for my business and some of the words in one keyword-string (search term) overlap with words in others. Like:
Advertising Illustration –and– Photo Illustration –and– Graphic Illustration Olympia
–or–
Graphic Design –and– Graphic Design Firm –and– Graphic Design Agency Olympia
There are hundreds of examples like this in my keyword/adgroup lists.
I want to get impressions in my chosen geo-targeting area for the generic keywords and when people search with a specific city name. The number of ads showing for searches with specific city names are far fewer of course, then without, and I’d like to capitalize on the lower CPC for those.
From reading here over the last couple days, it appears that I should probably set most of my keywords to exact, but I am unsure if that will solve my conflicts. Will I have to create reversed word-strings for the city specific keywords if I use exact match? Like:
Graphic Design Agency Olympia –and– Olympia Graphic Design Agency
Does exact match require words in a search phrase to be in the same exact order to get an impression?
Will an exact phrase match for [Graphic Design Agency Olympia] compete with the broad match for Graphic Design Agency?
I would still like to leave some of the generic terms set to broad match in case of misspelled words and other search terms I haven’t thought of yet.
Is changing to exact phrase match my next step?
Should I have separate campaigns or completely different accounts for broad match and exact match keywords? Right now I have conflicting keywords across campaigns when they are all set to phrase match and it was much, much worse when they were all set to broad match.
I hope my questions are clear. Please bonk me over the head if I need to supply more information. I’m sure I’ll be slapping myself on the forehead when I get a clear understanding of all this.
I discovered here that creating a new account and starting over my be the best solution to my dilemma, but I need to know more about what I’m doing first!
THANKS for taking time (my next question should be simpler)
Quickdraw
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[edited by: buckworks at 6:00 pm (utc) on June 26, 2008]
[edit reason] No URLs please. [/edit]
i think it's better to start with exact and phrase matches (remember to use negative match of exact keywords in the adgroups of phrase matches...)...you should use broad matches just to catch the remaining traffic (not so much)
