GOOGLE ADWORDS UPDATES - 21/08/08
Over at the AdWords blog Google have announced some changes made to how they are assessing the quality score of keywords in your campaigns.
One specific part of their announcement details the fact that they are no longer going to mark ads ‘inactive for search’ which often used to plague long tail keyword targeting campaigns. Personally I think this is great news, if managed correctly...
WHY WILL THE ‘INACTIVE FOR SEARCH’ CHANGES BE A GOOD THING?
I feel the changes made to this area will be positive for campaigners who like to target long tail phrases.
What has been happening is that if a campaign was setup and the keyword ‘cheap green widgets uk’ was entered, more often than not AdWords would mark it ‘inactive for search’ giving the reason that the there was a low volume of search for this keyword.
Targeting longer keyword phrases like the example is a good idea as if somebody did type in the phrase, your advert would be an extremely close match for the searchers requirements which has benefits for click through rates and conversion rates. Also, due to the often low levels of competition for these long tail phrases it is often cheaper to bid on these then more general phrases.
Going back to the example, if AdWords refused to show your ad for the phrase ‘cheap green widgets uk’ because of the low search volume there was still a way to get your ad to show, by using either phrase or broad matching criteria on a more general search term.
To explain this, if we added a keyword with broad match for ‘green widgets’ then there is a good chance that the search for ‘cheap green widgets uk’ would match and your ad was shown. However, broad match may well also match lots of other searches which are not as targeted to your desired audience wasting your precious marketing budgets!
It was one of the few strange ‘features’ in Google AdWords which I couldn’t really understand. The only explanation I can see is that it is in Google’s interests for you to bid on broad terms generating more clicks than specific exact terms which create little revenue for them.
ANY POTENTIAL DOWNSIDES?
There could be some downsides to this change. It has yet to be fully rolled out to all advertisers so until we see this new effect in action it is difficult to know how effective targeting these long tail keywords will be. If reporting is less in the AdWords interface it could lead to frustration finding out why bids are high or keywords not showing correctly.
Also, if this change does work as I hope it will most probably lead to more advertisers targeting the long tail keywords as standard pushing up bid prices.
I guess we will have to wait and see on this one, but overall my impressions of this part of the announcement are good.
ARTICLE DETAILS
Author: Darren Atkinson
Date Published: 22nd August, 2008