For one groups I have defined "widgets" as an exact match single-word-keyword. My maximum bid is set to 35 cents, google says I paid 28 cents on average, and my add would show up on position 1.1 on average. Quality score is 9 out of ten, ctr > 20% for the past week.
However, if I perform a search on this one-word-phrase myself, my add oscillates between spot #8 and nowhere on the first page at all.
How can this be?
The only explanation I may think of is this: All eight or twelve top-competitors defined the same bid, so that positioning is calculated almost randomly?
And I have another question: what happens if you define the same one-word-keyword once as exact match and once as broad match? the adwords editor gives a warning, but passes through. This strategy does make sense: Optimal bids may vary for both cases. But I have the impression that the algo gets confused a bit, particularly if this keyword is again part of some other phrases set to phrase match.
You might want to run a campaign report and check your impression share too as this might shed some light on whether you are showing up for all potential impressions, or just a small percentage where you show quite highly.
Re your second question, to deal with this we put the broad match keyword in it's own adgroup, and then negative match the exact version of it in this group, this means that the exact term shows up for the exact query, but you still get all of the benifit of the broad.
Good idea.
How do you generally handle the two- and more-word-terms you have found visitors tend to use? exact match? phrase match? I mean the positive ones.
I have been trying a lot to finetune my account the past three weeks, but I have the impression the more I do, the worse things develop:( My first campaign, which I began in March, went far better than expected, brought me many sales and averaged to 9 cent per click. Now that I have begun to tinker specific phrase's bids and raise ctr, I pay much more with no really positive effect on sales.
I want more control over the exact bids for specific phrases, but I currently think, this only makes sense after the period of collecting potential keywords has been finished and all broad matches in the same adgroup should be paused or deleted?
I'm still acting in a quite chaotic manner I'm afraid, and definietly need a much more concise strategy.
> The answer to your first question is that the average position data should be accurate
Nope, it isn't for two particular one-word-keywords, which I set to exact match. Could it be that the algo gets confused if the same term is part of other phrases? What is the general order by means of which google decides which of my entries is the apropriate one?
Assume i have
- widgets as exact match in one campaign leading a visitor to an explanatory page about my widgets and their various forms colors etc.
- "green widget" and "green widgets" as phrase match in another campaign with exactly those green products and their prices
or vice versa:
- widgets with low bids set to broad match in one campaign in order to record potetential keyword-inventory
- "green metal widgets" as exact match or phrase match with specific bids targeting a specific position
Now the visitor types in "green widgets made of metal". Which account-entry will google choose in Scenario A or B? (I'm feeling quite stupid at the moment)
I strongly recommend that you check your positions at different times of day, and look at what your competitors are doing. For instance, if you have a lot of competitors bidding high 9-5 you won't show up, or will show in a low position during those times, so when you check at that time of day you show low. But at 5pm your competitors switch their bids off, and you get #1 position throughout the night, but because you don't check at that time you don't show.
Scenario #2. Your daily budget is too low, so Google is only showing your ad 1 search out of 10, but your bid is high enough to put it in position 1 on these occasions. YOu could search all day and never see your ad, but when it does show you would be first.
#3 you are looking at an all time report, but 10 new competitors have come onto the market in the last week, pushing your ad down the rankings. You are still averaging at 1.1 because you were at #1 before that, but over time this average will drop. Have you checked what position Google had you at on that particular day?
Essentially your position is a record of where you have shown up on the page.
The way I manage my accounts is that I use a lot of negative exact, and exact match terms. So for instance, i start 2 new adgroups, A and B for example. in A I put my obvious terms as exact match and in B i have a broad match with negative exact matches of the terms I already have, so it looks like this;
A
[blue widgets]
[green widgets]
[yellow widgets]
B
Widgets
-[blue widgets]
-[green widgets]
-[yellow widgets]
If the search qwuery report tells me people are looking for red widgets I add the exact match to group A and the negative exact match to group B. I do this weekly, even for campaigns that have been running for some time. My broad match terms still get a lot of clicks but usually only for terms that aren't detailed (123 unique queries etc)
If it was relevant to my campaigns I may also use phrase match instead of having such expanded keyword lists, but my industry is so competative it simply doesn't work for us.
I don't think that any of the reasons you suggested is true for my case: All I did recently, was refine my account similar to the way you do. I want to tell google the more appropriate langing-pages, because from the times when my whole account was still running very broadly, I logged quite a number of keywords led to the wrong page.
However, this is a niche market: If I switch from broad to phrase-match, visitors drop by almost nine tenth. Sales get so low that you cannot even tell by statistics whether this refining has led to a better conversion rate (which should be the case because of better usability).
> I do this weekly, even for campaigns that have been running for some time
I am planning to develop an interface using the google api for exactly this: List and sort the keywords registered on the landing-pages. But sometimes I have the impression that google doesn't really care about lists of 100s of positive phrases. In my niche, most of these phrases will be "not shown due to low search-volume," which means to me, that google has not picked these terms in its evaluation-database.
