Is my local campaign setup properly?

[realmaverick]

I'm trying to manage an adwords campaign for an electrician friend. I'm a complete novice and the more I read, the more confused I end up feeling.

I appreciate I can throw up a couple of ads and leave them, but I want to do this properly and compete. I want this to generate business not just cost money.

My setup
I have split categories up in to towns. So there's a different category for Portsmouth and Southamptom for example. This seemed like a logical way to structure the account.

The campaign level is geographically targeted by the matching town. Therefore my ad should only be triggered by people searching within that location or they specifically target the location with keyword?

The ad groups are then broken down in to themes, for example (emergency electrician) and another is directly targetting (electrician portsmouth). Each of these ad groups has their own keywords, ads and landing page. I am using exact match keywords in these ad groups for example [electrician portsmouth] [electricians in portsmouth] and so on.

I have negative keywords setup for words such as auto, to eliminate people searching for auto electricians etc.

My biggest concern is absolute lack of impressions. I appreciate it's not going to generate thousands but we're talking under 100 impressions a day right now, spanning 10 towns and each town has specific ad groups targeting emergency electrician, qualified electrician and so on.

Today, I even setup a new campaign, targeting the exact match [electrician] which targetted a 15 mile radius but that has failed to generate many impressions either.

Either hardly nobody searches for electricians online, or I'm doing something drastically wrong here.

Finally, a slight confusion with match types. If I setup a phrase match post type with a keyword such as "electrician bournemouth" will this compete with [electrician bournemouth] and if so, do I prevent that by simply adding -[electrician bournemouth] at the ad group level?

Any advice as to what I might be doing wrong would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[buckworks]

IMHO what's needed here would be at least one ad group that uses broad match terms so you could catch relevant searches that don't happen to match what you've already targeted with exact or phrase match.

If you're only targeting exact match or phrase match, that's likely too restrictive unless you have a gazillion terms and variations in your account.

Suggestion: create one or more ad groups that use modified broad match, to give a wider reach within the target area. Monitor the activity they generate, and watch for for productive terms you could add to your exact match collections. Also watch for new negatives to block.

Modified broad match uses the plus sign, like this:

+electrician
+electrician +portsmouth
+electrician +bournemouth

The plus sign limits the broad matching to variations that are quite close and reduces the problem of "over-reaching" that can happen with unmodified broad match.

If I setup a phrase match post type with a keyword such as "electrician bournemouth" will this compete with [electrician bournemouth] and if so, do I prevent that by simply adding -[electrician bournemouth] at the ad group level?

Yes, they would compete with each other but in this context I wouldn't see that as anything to worry about. Unless you'd have a reason to serve significantly different ads to phrase vs exact match searches, just leave them both in the same ad group and don't worry about trying to block one or the other.

[tommytx]

I didn't hear you mention Quality Score even once... this is a very important feature.. make sure your keyphrase matches your quality score as close as possible... Low quality score means low click thru and google hates low click thru... and therefore do not show your ads as often. Also this normally causes your CPC to slowly climb out of site.. is it costing you more and more to show.. or no..

[realmaverick]

@bucksworks, thanks. I have a BMM campaign separate to the exact match, although it doesn't seem to get many impressions. I think this is largely because I have the exact match covered quite well and I have negative KW's setup containing the exact matches.

Yes, they would compete with each other but in this context I wouldn't see that as anything to worry about. Unless you'd have a reason to serve significantly different ads to phrase vs exact match searches, just leave them both in the same ad group and don't worry about trying to block one or the other.

That's useful to know, thanks. I thought if they competed with one another, it would cause the CPC to rise, but then that did feel a little illogical.

@tommytx, none of the impressions are yet in the thousands, which means I'm only being shown QS for the keywords on the network as a whole, rather than how they perform in my account.

The keywords are all relevant to the campaigns in question and the ads and landing pages are also well matched.

Thanks for the replies.

[Radisson]

Tommy; you Mix up the facts.

Keyphrases in add should match keywords

And
Low CTR impact QS

G is not showing only High QS Ads. Low QS ads are just more expensive or rank lower.