Google Text Ads: Keyword Analysis

In a blog series of Google Text Ads Best Practices we are diving into how you can optimize your Google Text Ads to get the best results. In this blog post we are diving into the world of Keyword Analysis with Dorte Tindahl from ASENTO.

Consider what your customers might search for as the last search before purchasing/booking. These keywords will be your money-makers.

When creating a keyword analysis, it is important to have a look at what keywords are the most relevant for your business. Don’t start out advertising keywords such as pants if you’re not the same size as Zalando, Bestseller or Boozt.com. It won't work. The chances for a client searching for pants and finding your products so interesting that they must buy, is relatively small compared to the bigger e-commerce stores.

If you imagine the customer journey; the person searching for a pair of pants hasn’t decided what color, length, style, fit or brand they’d like. They are likely to do another search in their journey – and advertising on the word “pants” will most likely not be a good investment when you are new to text ads.

Having a setup that generates a positive ROI (Return On Investment) – or POAS (Profit Over Ad Spend), makes you able to have a broader perspective. A few years back, you were able to see pretty much all the search terms that your keyword triggered. At least anything that triggered a click. This is not the case anymore. Google will not show you the full picture. You’re shown around 50-70% of all the search terms that triggered a click or a substantial number of impressions.
Google AI is getting better at predicting what your keyword should trigger. It has broadened its perspective. This means that Google sometimes misses the mark – They do not always know what is relevant for you. Sometimes you might see matches that are pretty far from the keyword you initially submitted – But might have relevance to the industry or keyword in some way. Therefore, you need to be sharp when creating your list of keywords.

Be mindful of negative keywords

One way to look for negative keywords is to make use of Google’s Keyword tool.
Insert your URL and get an overview of all the keywords that Google finds relevant for your page. Check this list thoroughly and take any phrase you do not want as a keyword in your campaign. If you want to know which keywords a DSA will match your website to – it’s a good tattletale.
You might also want to enter specific keywords to see a selection of possible search terms associated with your seed keyword.
Any keyword not relevant to your business should be put on a negative keyword list on your campaign.
With Google not reporting back on the search terms efficiently, it is better to get a good start and do the work in the beginning.
Negative keywords such as job, work, education, training, free, download, trainee etc are almost always a good idea to include in your negative keyword list.

Split your keyword analysis into campaigns and ad groups

Once you’ve created your keyword analysis, you should divide this into campaigns based on themes and then subdivide into ad groups.
Campaigns should be created based on your website to quickly have an overview on performance for your products or services.
Creating a perfect ad group can be a little complicated. You need to take your entire sum of keywords in one campaign into consideration. Think about how you can write an ad text that embraces the sum of your keywords. Impossible, right? That means that you need further segmentation. Dividing keywords into more segmented ad groups enables you to create specific ad texts that help you with keyword relevance.

A couple of years ago the proper way of building ad groups would have been SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Groups) But Google’s decision to phase out Modified Broad Match and the implementations of broader matches for Exact and Phrase Matches, this would be an outdated way of building your ad group structure.
There is no longer an actual keyword – not even Exact Match – that will give only one search term.
So, at ASENTO we use Optimized Keyword Grouping.
So, see your ad group as a group of words (doh), that will give Google clues as to what the theme for your ad group is, along with your ad text.

Author:

Dorte Tindahl
COO & Partner at ASENTO