it is a little know fact that donkeys like strawberries. It is a lesser known fact that donkeys prefer Spanish strawberries served by a Spaniard over English ones served by an Englishman.

Must be something to do with geo-location of the server.

At the beginning of a campaign I’ve used broad match with negative keywords and then run a search query performance report to weed out anything. It’s most economical to run phrase or exact match, although it takes longer to set up initially but you have far more control.

I agree with the comment about conversions, these should be resolved first, fix the holes in the bucket and then bring in more traffic.

Yes, easy to spend a fortune on PPC unless it’s managed correctly.

Thanks for a great post.

Google rank ads on relevancy, the side affect of this is that a more relevant ad will be shown more and will end up making Google more money.

There is no need to worry about your competitors CTR, knowing it isn’t essential to the success of your campaign. Why do you feel it is important to know your competiors CTR?

The last couple of paragraphs seem to me to be saying that Google ranks ads on the basis, effectively, on how much money they make from it – a combination of how much you pay and your click through rate. That’s useful as I didn’t know that.

However, while I can find my own CTR (somewhere), how do I know what my competition’s is? Unless I know that, knowing the other stuff you’ve opened my eyes to won’t help me, will it?

S

Majority of my clients I find hate the mention of adwords / PPC because they have done exactly what you said above themselves

“throw words into a list, write an advert, and set it running”

They think it costs a fortune, with no real return. I even had one client who was spending £1000 a month and not even using phrase or exact matching! Nightmare…

Glad you liked. As you say, many people blame PPC, but the fact is they are shooting the messenger, rather than looking at the message being sent!

OWG

You’re quite right in saying that keyword research is THE most important aspect of a ppc marketing campaign.

And when you hit it right, you actually don’t *need* thousands of keywords, contrary to what some experts suggest.

A dozen keywords usually bring in about 90ish% of a campaigns profits. (obviously, the key is knowing which dozen to go after!)

Also when people moan about the cost of pay per click, it’s usually because their website isn’t converting the traffic to sales (which is a subject in itself!).

Anyway, again, great post. You’ve got another RSS subscriber!

George.