PPC: Volume vs. Margin

my business has their 1st successful PPC campaign going around a security software product. We started with a small list of 144 keywords on overture, moved our bids from low (.11) to high (1.00), keeping words that where winning based on the best cash flow we could produce. So our list of 144 words cam down to 5 words, and 5 optimized ads. While this site is doing $50-$100 in profit, and we are excited by that, I have questions!

1) when I read various PPC forums, I see a lot of people talking about managing 5K+ keywords. For those out their doing that, is that traditionally done in lots of keywords to one ad? How are you optimizing the ad/keyword for max results?

2) On large word campaigns, are you showing up on page 1 for whatever search engine you have?

3) How far off are you moving from your core keyword? for instance, if you are selling ringtones, are you advertising under music downloads as well?

I appreciate feedback from the PPC veterans. I don't mind work and experimentation, hoping to avoid some pitfalls! If this has already been covered on the forum, if someone can point me in that direction i will be most appreciated!

Firstly, you are only advertising on Overture. When people go on about 5k keyword lists (some of my campaigns have +30k) they are most likely referring to Google Adwords. If you have a 5k keyword list on Adwords and submit it to Overture, their system will cut that down to a couple of hundred due to duplicate keywords (plurals etc) and zero searches (when no one searched for that term the previous month).

Overture forces you to use only one ad per keyword, so customise the ad for that keyword. Use the phrase in the title and make the body text relevant.

Yes, try to get onto the first page for all your keywords, but this does depend on whether they prove profitable.

The further you move away from your 'core keywords' the greater the likelihood that your campaign will deliver a poor ROI. However, I am generalising and there are cases where you could possibly want to do this.

We are beginning our testing on AdWords, so I am interested in whatever you can share in terms of your experience.

1)So, when you say you have 30K+ campaings, how many ads are you running into those 30 words? My concern was that if we wrote generic ads, we would loose relevancy and click through.

2) you mentioned that your adwords campaign had some duplicate words, like plurarls. So, if you wanted to use dogs as one of your keyword, in adWords would you put
dog
dogs
[dogs]
[dog]

etc? I am having a hard time understanding how you could go deep enough to have 30k keywords in one campaign. Do you have say 500 keywords (as example only) and then you are creating ad groups around a dog breed so that each adGroup has the 500 words + the breed?

Thanks!

I have about 10 campaigns, 350 ad groups and about 3 ads per ad group so +-450 which all deeplink to different pages on the site. The campaign I'm using as an example is for a retail client, but travel sites with numerous destinations are similar. For an insurance campaigns I usually only have 2-3 campaigns, maybe 35 adgroups, and again 3 ads per ad group.

Try to write relevant ads. You can make life easier by using the dynamic keyword insert in your ad copy. This also helps with the quality score which influences your CPC.


For more info on creating large keyword list see one of my old posts: http://forums.seochat.com/pay-per-click-37/another-ppc-keyword-tool-82457.html

You also used exact match for your dog example - [dog].
If you really want to optimise your campaign to the utmost, I'd suggest using all three match types: broad, "phrase" and [exact]. Put the broad match keywords in at the lowest CPC , exact at the highest and phrase somewhere in between. This will help in the following ways:

1)The exact keywords will get clicks costs and other data like position for the precise keyword that you have used e.g [medical insurance].

2)The phrase match and broad match keywords will pick up variations of your keywords that you din't think of BUT they won't trigger ads for the ones you DID. So "medical insurance" will trigger ads for a search for 'cheap medical insurance' and broad match medical insurance might trigger for 'cheap health insurance'. These 2 matching options help you cover more variations but the data you get isn't exact - you don't really know which searches are triggering your ads.

The most important thing is to keep optimising. If a couple of keywords are getting all the clicks and converting, then you may want to create an individual ad group with highly specific ad copy for just that 1 keyword. This really helps increase your quality score and if you have £5-£10 bids this can mean huge savings.

Anyway, if you have any other questions feel free to ask.

Thanks for the replies. I am going to do some more experimenting based on your feedback, and then come back with more questions!

I have done some big list expiramentation and built what is a big list for me, almsot 5000 words, so on Google that would be 15,000.

I have put it on Yahoo so far, and they did pare it down to about 2500 total and supposedly their engine does all the plurals, phrases, misspells, etc. with 'advanced match'.

I am preparing to put it on Google and wondered the best way to load it. Are there any tips or tricks to load that wil save time and get the words reviewed quicker?

I was very dissapoitned with the intial words I loaded because they all appeared to be apporved, but that was not the case. It took a LONG time to get them al approved. Basical is seem they are approved when they begin to get impressions, and no other way to tell from there.

Any help on loading and managing a "big list" would be appreciated.

Also, is the point fo the big lists volume? Meaning, there are a ton of obscure terms that do nto get a lot of searchs, but I haev a lto fo them and I can then pay more for the words that are searched a lot?

Thanks,