Adwords and Keywords

[billbenson]

Some of the recent posts here got me to take a look at the keywords for my main site. The site is a mature site. It places 2 for my best keyword on G and does well on adwords. I haven't been saving search terms from my stats, so I have lost information, but I have 2k keyphrases from the last 2 years. A few thousand keywords from Adwords as well.

To side track to adwords for a minute. Adwords was what allowed me to get the site going. It took a long time for the natural SERPS to bring in traffic. It probably took me about 6 months to get a good adwords campaign going. I started out with low budgets. I raised the budget, but turned the campaign off and on until I was sure I could be profitable. After tweaking it for about 6 months and constantly writing ads, adwords was costing me about 10% of my profits. I cut way back on my adwords campaign when my natural SERPS started doing well. I'm going to ramp up the adwords again though.

Adwords made some changes recently and I have been looking at that this evening. I've had some lousy ads that I want to edit or delete. Some that work well, that I didn't think would.

So, in three years, I've had 80k clicks, 5M ad impressions, 1.38% CTR, 0.24 CPC. I have about 200 different ads. Glancing through the data, I have quite a few really good ads getting a lot of impressions and clicks (40% CTR at 0.17 CPC).

Even with the new reporting, there is two much information to properly analyze, so I'm going to put the adwords data together with my site statistics in a database. It's not enough to just look at a CPC or CTR etc. in determining your ads. You need to look at which products are the most profitable and see how they work with your ads etc.

So I'm going to stick everything I can in a keyword database and write some custom reports to help me not only with ad campaigns, but in finding new keywords, products to push, price points, page optimization etc.

For any adwords skeptics out there, it can be profitable. Remember, it can also help you with refining your site and finding keywords. It is a lot of work though.

I have a lot of ideas as to what I want to do with this data. I am very interested as well if anybody else here has some suggestions.

[vangogh]

Sounds like you're going to look at the data the right way. I completely agree there's a lot to look at and that you have to look beyond the simple CTR and CPC. Do you have your AdWords account connected to your Analytics account (assuming you have an Analytics account) or at least do you have AdWords set up to show you which keywords result in a sale?

I'm thinking this won't apply to you, but is it possible there are seasonal trends with certain keywords so you could group them in a way allowing you to turn them on and off seasonally.

If you haven't already done this (I think you may have) it's a good idea to group your keywords into themes and then build campaigns around each theme. That way you can better target the ads to the keywords. Also do you test ads against each other? Are you running more than one ad per keyword group?

The main thing you probably want to do now is tie in the keywords to the actual revenue the keyword brings in. That should tell you which keywords are most profitable and which you either need to drop or change something to improve their profitability.

[billbenson]

I group ads by product, which is kind of like theme. For each product I do 3 groups: same ad with one group just the phrase, next "xxxx", and [xxxx]. If its not performing I play with test ads etc.

Kind of hard to tell whether a click came from adwords although you can capture search terms for site visitors so maybe that will tell you. One thing I can do is cross reference stats search terms with ads and ad clicks?

I'll get it all in a db first and then figure out how to colate it. I had it done last night, but I want to add some more table fields etc, so I'm going to redo it. This will probably be a work in progress forever.

One thing I was thinking of is categorizing all key phrases. One thing that would allow me to do is have it generate ad campaigns for me. The program could output the ad, htaccess referal and keywords. Obviously that would require hand tweaking, but it would be a lot faster than what I'm doing now. Could be particularly valuable on new sites.

For a quick landing page, what I frequently do is a search for a product and use that as the landing page changing the dynamic url to something with keywords in htaccess. I modified the search page so the title and h1 are the search term. It's not ideal, but it works pretty well, particularly when the competitions landing page is usually just some page on their site.

[vangogh]

You should be able to easily tell if a click came from AdWords. There will be a referrer string in the URL that I believe says AdWords in it. You'll also get the search phrase in the URL. Check your server logs. It's right in there.

If you have Analytics set up that'll tell you about your AdWords clicks as well.