Simple question ...
Do I focus on adding as many exact matches as I can, or focus on adding as many negatives as I can? Or both? In the case of exact match terms, how far is far enough? What if a term only gets 20 impressions per month? etc
What if a term only gets 20 impressions per month?
In that case you can expand your campaign on weekly basis. After starting off with exact match you can add phrase match keywords. In this process do not forget to add negative keywords.
A combination of exact, phrase and negative keywords will help you to eliminate junk traffic. Also do not forget to keep the ad text as detailed as possible. Certain useful descriptions within the ad texts will also help to eliminate irrelevant clicks.
When using broad matched keyword it is always useful to look into Google Keyword tool for the terms which are appearing under "Expanded Broad Matches". Often there may be many keywords which can be added under negatives.
I'm currently doing all of this, the "problem" is the broad match terms I keep in the account. I use these primarily to build out my keyword list - I monitor all clicks and if someone reached my site after searching on a term I don't have as an exact and/or phrase match, I add it. The only problem is that these broad match terms also generate a lot of curiosity clicks ... especially since we offer a free service.
In these cases you should try to match these words against your conversion rates. What we do is to get the search terms words used by the people who clicked on our ads and is not already in our keyword list. If there have been atleast 20 clicks in the last 5 days, we analyze it further. If it is not relevant we immediately add it to the negative list. Otherwise, even if there is a doubt, we add it to the normal list and then track the conversion rate of this new keyword. After sufficient clicks if the conversion rate is low, it gets the boot and is added to the negative list.
All this is quite demanding but the API goes a long way in automating this process.
My "problem" is that there are literally an unlimited number of variations that people are using to search for widget information that is not related to my widget site. Most of these don't get anywhere near 20 clicks in 5 days, however, we have already built a list of over 5,000 such terms just from irrelevent clicks in the past month. Most have just a single click.
I'm starting to think that it will be pretty tough to keep this under control, and once we build up our phrase and exact match terms a little more we should just ditch the broad matches altogether...
* Negative keywords, which are a very valuable tool to prevent broad and phrase matched keywords from showing your ads in inappropriate places, do not have any impact on exact matched keywords. So, if at some point, you had all exact matches, you would no longer need negatives.
* Remember that negative keywords will impact all phrase and broad matched keywords in the Ad Group. So if there are words there that you do not want the negatives to 'protect', you'll need to put them in another Ad Group.
AWA
Regarding the first point, we are going back and forth on what to do. It's either focus on building out our keyword list and have an exact match for every conceivable term and not needing negatives, or building out the negative list and continuing to use less exact matches plus some phrase and broad matches. We can't seem to decide which makes the most sense ...
Regarding the 2nd point, the irrelevent terms are very obvious - once we see that someone has used that term to reach our site. We monitor clicks daily and continue adding to our negative list for now. It's just one of those things where you would never think of all the negatives untli you see them in the logs. But the irrelevent terms are obvious once we see them, and we apply them across the board at the campaign level.
