I like the strategy, thank you for sharing.

For the last few years, I’ve used thousands of KWs and a combination of broad match and phrase match. It’s largely been successful.

Never tried negatives.

Recently, I started wondering why I use so many KWs and was planning to run an experiment where I just used ONE keyword and broad match. I would then write my Ad to be the main filter. Still no negatives.

All quite interesting.

Nice tip; definitely a good way to proactively identify negatives against the broad keywords.

Thanks!

Tom

I choose 1 or 2 broad “medium volume” relevant keywords…

using the G kwtool, I add all the non relevant keywords associated with these two kws as negative broad.

rinse and repeat… take all those non relevant terms, plug them back into the G kwtool and add more.

in the end you have maybe hundreds of negatives and only 2 or 3 broad kws.

Life becomes simple, I mean I have only 3 eggs to take care of

Actually that’s definitely not the case. Broad match has become really aggressive and in fact Google might match your ad against something that doesn’t contain any of the terms in your keyword. PPC Proz had a good post that exemplifies some problematic examples here: http://blog.ppcproz.com/2009/01/adwords-broad-keywords-bloopers.html.

Phrase match would require the use of all three terms, but broad match definitely does not.

Thanks!

Tom

cheap used banjos

I don’t think your ad would show if someone typed in

online banjo store

Now if you’ve just got the word “banjo” on broad match, it would show then, but if you’ve got a three word keyword phrase, don’t all three words in the keyword phrase have to be in the search query for an ad to show?

No problemo. Thanks for the clarification.

RM

Yep embedded match certainly isn’t new. I pointed to Brad’s article because I thought it was a nice, succinct definition. Apologies if I conveyed it as “new”, but embedded match still functions the same way.

Tom

@ Leslie – Lowering bids shouldn’t, in theory, hurt QS. You will likely get lower position and quite possibly a lower click-through rate, but Google says they normalize for position, which means that having a 1 percent click through rate in position 7 might be the same as having a 3 percent click-through rate in first position. More on that here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/improvements-to-ads-quality.html

@Vittorio Thanks! We’ll be “launching” a blog soon, hope you check it out!

@ Zak – Haha yep, should have been proprietary asset, good catch. Yep tracking keywords into the “back of the loop” is definitely crucial for actual profits.

Sorry I didn’t respond to thes, you know: when I made the post! Thanks!

Tom