Advice from G Advisors and recommended items

[Mark_A]

In perhaps the last 8 months I have been broadly following the advice of my G advisors and some of the recommendations from the interface itself.

Some recommendations I just won't accept.

However I used to have a very tied down set of keywords, many exact match and the relevance of my visitors was good (plenty of good enquiries) although I probably missed some because of my insistence on exact match. Now after following my G advisors recommendations I find we have ended up with a lot of broad match keywords, various auto bidding strategies and the result is we are spending money on various search terms which are just not relevant for us and which negative keywords just won't catch because they fluctuate.

I am spending my budget which I am sure G is pleased about, but decent enquiries are becoming quite scarce.

Should I abandon G Advisors advice and return to exact match?

[chewy]

Ask the advisors if they can help you tune it to work to your expectations. See what they do.

Last time I tried this, they were not particularly cooperative.

Years ago, I got to know a couple of these advisors elsewhere and I was astounded at what seemed to me to have been little education these particular folks had. Also astounded at how young they were.

[Martin Potter]

<aside> Today we call them Millennials. :-/ </aside>

[Mark_A]

I am going to have to make changes, the search terms reports show I am spending money on terms which are not relevant. Because of broad match. The G advisors are plenty clever when it comes to their software, interface and what it can do, but they haven't any experience in my industry so they don't immediately know what are valid search terms and what are not!

[chewy]

Um... they - those millennials and their superiors - have no interest in your business other than what kind of money you will pump into their Advertising system.

You might note how many searches as shown in your STR are actually invisible to you.

Sometimes this can be quite a large number.

Figuring out what you can't see is actually something you should try to do.

Ultimately, you may be better off with a million negatives AND broad match.

I do not like that method although it might make sense. I much prefer exact match (which is a bit more like broad match anyway...)

In terms of discovering what you can't see, here is an example or two which I am happy to share.

Years ago I was running a fairly large account and a large percentage of the AdWords search terms were (increasingly) being obscured (due to what they were calling privacy issues) and it was costing the client a lot of money for queries that generated the lowest engagement rates for the entire account.

Somehow, I figured out that since our business was focused on a lot of proper names, Google was somehow showing a lot of queries that were street addresses - as if someone would type in a name and an address to find someone. So I built a huge database of numbers to use as negative keywords. In this case, the several thousand negatives made a huge difference.

Even today, I suspect most accounts could benefit - some more than others - from blocking ALL numbers - both digits and (if you think this applies too) spelled out.

I also knew from reading that there was something called a "stop" word that might also help reduce the wasted costs. So I used negative keywords to eliminate a ton of pronouns, articles, prepositions and conjunctions. Today that may be a less popular strategy as speak to search is more sentence based and all these stop words (the, a, and, who, what, when, why, where, etc) all help make up a sentence that can put more context around key words and phrases.

Plenty more tricks where they came from - but you'd have to pay for those :-) !

[Mark_A]

Hi chewey, broad match and lots of negatives doesn't seem to be viable as the negative words change every day / week etc ..

We make widgets, custom widgets and the like bespoke to our customer's needs.

However the search terms are things like "audi widgets", "morris widgets", "replacement bmw widgets", "airbus widgets", etc - none of which we do.

[buckworks]

>> the negative words change every day

Then keep adding to your negative keyword lists every day. It's vital work.

Monitor your query reports, of course, but also spend some forward-thinking time with keyword suggestion tools to watch for unsuitable queries that could be blocked before they happen to you.

In particular, watch for individual words that could block multiple queries. Example: if I were promoting wedding tuxedos there would be little value in having my ads appear in queries about tuxedo cats. Adding "cat", "cats", "kitten", "kittens" to my negative list(s) would block a number of off-target searches without the need to list reams of individual phrases.

In my experience, Google reps need a stronger grasp of the fact that merely churning traffic is not enough, advertisers can only keep paying for ads if they reach traffic that actually converts.

[Mark_A]

Hi Buckworks thanks for your comment, I don't think adding to negative keywords is going to cut it because I will always be chasing my tail while new irrelevant searches and clicks are being made day in day out wasting my money.

I think the only solution is to tighten the whole thing up by reverting to exact match.

[chewy]

We saw entire "new" categories of products identified in our search term reports - so it makes a bit of sense to run exact match most of the time, but to let broad match run maybe 10 - 20% of the time.

Fortunately, we stumbled across this opportunity very early on in the account. It made a lot of money for the client, and it opened up both new products and new categories of products.

[buckworks]

Exact and broad match can be both/and, they don't have to be either/or.

FWIW, my approach would be to create separate campaigns for exact vs broad, with the most aggressive bids in the exact match and cheapskate bids in the broad match. Then keep monitoring the query reports not just to spot negative keywords but also to mine for new queries that would be good additions to the exact match campaign.

Did the reps give you any suggestions about raising your CTR by testing different ad wordings?

[Kendo]

If any G advisors actually knew what they are doing they would be concentrating on their own site and making a living from that, and they certainly would not be helping competitors.

[Mark_A]

buckworks said Did the reps give you any suggestions about raising your CTR by testing different ad wordings?

Hi Buckworks, we (not they) have in the past worked on the quality of the ads and the quality of the landing pages, quite a lot of work to not a great deal of result unfortunately but the reps haven't gone there at all so far.

At the moment I am a bit angry because yet again I have the situation that G isn't showing me all the search terms that visitors clicked on which means I suspect that my advisor turned on display on the ad network which I am dead against. I can't see any other explanation, if it is true I will be very cross because I specifically only want our ads to appear on the G search pages.

[Mark_A]

I am just trying to find the easiest way to change a campaign and number of adgroups, replacing broad and phrase match keywords with exact match and making sure to align the new exact match keywords with the right (many) adgroups. At the moment I am using filters to try and get a simple list of what I have to edit but because this campaign has been active since 2008 with many changes over the years there are loads of deleted and paused and active keywords on it I have to wade through. Is there a simpler way?

[Mark_A]

Well I made the change to exact match - it feels good to be taking back control - I don't mind if I get a much reduced quantity of impressions as long as the quality is there. And I can monitor terms I might be missing by making the key term broad match for a couple of days if I feel the need.

On the issue of G Advisors, I asked for a session from an advisor I had the last two times, we understand each other to a certain extent. G came back recommending someone new. They always do this it seems, a couple of sessions with one advisor then change it up with a new one. I have no clue why, but it irritates, no sooner has an advisor some idea what you are about and they change them for a new one. Bad form if you ask me!

[Mark_A]

Rather than go into specifics, I am discovering the shortcomings behind trusting my companies money to the various automated bidding strategies that my G advisors believe will benefit us.