Keyword Grouping Question

[AgentPaul001]

Hey guys,

Although Adwords killed me at first and it still isn't making me money, at least its "sensible" unlike YSM.

My question has to do with keyword groupings. Right now I've got a campaign for example with 2 adgroups and maybe 50 keywords with 25 in each adgroup. The first adgroup is my "high-performing" keywords that get basically the most traffic and the second adgroup is more long tails that still get traffic & convert, just not as good CTR.

So I have a situation right now like this.....

ADGROUP 1
Great Keyword
Great Keyword
Good Keyword
Bad Keyword
Bad Keyword

ADGROUP 2
Great Keyword
Good Keyword
Bad Keyword
Bad Keyword
Bad Keyword

What I've started to do, but paused for now, is move all of my great keywords into the first adgroup (with my best ad copies) and also move out my bad keywords.

My main question is, will this have any benefit? And more importantly will this hurt the bad keywords if I lump them together? The Quality Score on the bad keywords is still Okay/Great for all of them, but the good keywords all have great Quality Scores.

[mystickcal]

You defintely want to get your great converting keywords into their own adgroup. I personally have my top converting keywords each in their own adgroup with their own ads.

If you have lets say 100 keywords to start, probably 5 of those will be your top profit makers, so its really not hard to put those in their own adgroup and keep up with them.

[AgentPaul001]

Yah thats what I figured, since I've done that for other campaigns where it was just a couple.

In this one its the same situation, but maybe like ten keywords each getting the majority of the adgroups traffic.

It helped today though, the QS for the keywords left rose significantly & CPC dropped. I'm still losing money on adwords, but eventually I hope to turn things around. I'll report back with the results.

[mystickcal]

Yeah make sure to keep us updated as it really helps new members understand how things work and if it did or didn't work for you.

[AgentPaul001]

Killed.......

But not why you might expect. So after some additional keyword optimization (moving them around) some stuff is obvious.

1) Google remembers good & bad. So my good keywords retained their same QS roughly and are performing basically the same as before.

2) Ad copies should be tested over on the new individual keywords too, since if you've got multiple ad copies and multiple keywords, sometimes the performance of a particular ad copy on a particular keyword will "weight" things big time. I found this out the hard way, my best ad copy was actually the best ad copy for a few of the keywords, but for the others my "alternate" ad copies performed significantly better, but I never knew that until I saw some poor performance today on high volume.



SO THE ACTUAL BAD NEWS SORT OF

I've been pushing this campaign hard, losing money, because I heard from others that its best to dominate in Adwords at first then "settle" in eventually since it so hard to work up. Well domination must have worked because after a few weeks of steady performance at let's say (making these up, but based off real numbers) CPC $.50 and second ad Position, I've been moving up steadily and seeing big drops in my CPC so last night I saw a consistent drop to CPC $.35 (WHOOP!)......but my ad position went up to almost position 1 (not so bad....right?) WRONG! My conversions fuckin tanked, almost totally proportional to my upward movement.

I mean TANKED. In-fact I'm basically getting the same number of conversions as at Position 2, but with a much higher amount of traffic. So far position 1 = maybe 20% more traffic, but that extra traffic doesn't convert at all.

I had this running over night which hurt, and I didn't want to jump to conclusions today, but it was looking so bad......so what'd I do? Dropped my bid prices by about 10%.....which dropped my CPC, but my position on some ads keeps rising arghhh.

In the long run the high quality score will help lower my CPC, but until then I'll have to suffer the losses I guess. I've lowered my bid about 1/3 since I initially launched the campaign into a high traffic niche (I went into top 3 right off the bat) and if I actually manage to settle at about half my original bid int the Top 3 I'll call it a success :P

[mystickcal]

Killed.......

But not why you might expect. So after some additional keyword optimization (moving them around) some stuff is obvious.

1) Google remembers good & bad. So my good keywords retained their same QS roughly and are performing basically the same as before.

2) Ad copies should be tested over on the new individual keywords too, since if you've got multiple ad copies and multiple keywords, sometimes the performance of a particular ad copy on a particular keyword will "weight" things big time. I found this out the hard way, my best ad copy was actually the best ad copy for a few of the keywords, but for the others my "alternate" ad copies performed significantly better, but I never knew that until I saw some poor performance today on high volume.



SO THE ACTUAL BAD NEWS SORT OF

I've been pushing this campaign hard, losing money, because I heard from others that its best to dominate in Adwords at first then "settle" in eventually since it so hard to work up. Well domination must have worked because after a few weeks of steady performance at let's say (making these up, but based off real numbers) CPC $.50 and second ad Position, I've been moving up steadily and seeing big drops in my CPC so last night I saw a consistent drop to CPC $.35 (WHOOP!)......but my ad position went up to almost position 1 (not so bad....right?) WRONG! My conversions fuckin tanked, almost totally proportional to my upward movement.

I mean TANKED. In-fact I'm basically getting the same number of conversions as at Position 2, but with a much higher amount of traffic. So far position 1 = maybe 20% more traffic, but that extra traffic doesn't convert at all.

I had this running over night which hurt, and I didn't want to jump to conclusions today, but it was looking so bad......so what'd I do? Dropped my bid prices by about 10%.....which dropped my CPC, but my position on some ads keeps rising arghhh.

In the long run the high quality score will help lower my CPC, but until then I'll have to suffer the losses I guess. I've lowered my bid about 1/3 since I initially launched the campaign into a high traffic niche (I went into top 3 right off the bat) and if I actually manage to settle at about half my original bid int the Top 3 I'll call it a success :P

All you have to do is set the position preference in adwords to position 2 and you won't have to worry about getting the junk traffic from position 1. In fact, I normally find that positions 3 - 6 work the best.

[AgentPaul001]

Yah I agree, although this particular niche the top positions tend to have a higher chunk of overall traffic and almost all my competitors have the same ad copies so I'm think 2<>3 will be good for me.

Would it be cheaper to use position preference or CPC bid in the long run if I'm still aiming for position 2.0?

[artarmon42]

Don't do position preference.
You'll see a sharp drop in impressions.

But don't take my word for it ;)

[AgentPaul001]

Am I missing the sarcasm :P So far it seems to be doing fine.....

[artarmon42]

If you don't notice the difference in position preference, then you might not be getting the full reach (i.e. volume) of Google.

When I turn on position preference, my volume drops by about 60-75%.
But then again, I spend about $200k/m with Google, so it's really obvious when my volume drops haha!

[keliix06]

Need an employee? :D

[mystickcal]

If you don't notice the difference in position preference, then you might not be getting the full reach (i.e. volume) of Google.

When I turn on position preference, my volume drops by about 60-75%.
But then again, I spend about $200k/m with Google, so it's really obvious when my volume drops haha!

Hmm, really? I've never noticed a drop when using position preference. Now I wouldn't do this when your first starting a campaign, but once you have it going, and your cpc has started to drop and your ad position increases, you should be able to use it without any problems.

I'm going to have to do some testing now as this is the first time I've ever heard this.

[artarmon42]

Feel free to test away :)

Some of the things you'll find (let's just assume you set preferred position of 2-5):
1) If you'd normally get position 1, your ad won't show. Most people WRONGLY assume that Google is smart enough to drop them lower into their preferred position.
2) If you'd normally get position 6 or lower, your ad won't show.
3) Even if Google shows Average Position of 4, it is an AVERAGE and your ad might range between 1 and 7. So putting in 2-5 will result in a significant drop, as your ad won't show all the times that it is at position 1, 6 or 7.

[AgentPaul001]

I didn't noticeable a big change in impressions with keyword grouping however, I've only got like 50 keywords and they were averaging 1<>2 so my position preference wasn't much lower so that might have played a factor.

That said.......my positions didn't change much at all according to adwords even with it on, so not sure what happened.

SO....the onward march continues. Seperating out my high performing keywords has helped and I've turned off every keyword that wasn't doing good already. Now every keyword I have has a great QS & solid minimum bid and positions have begun to rise again (sigh) back to Position 1 on most......I dropped bids yesterday significantly, but that basically just dropped my CPC. My CPC has dropped about 5% which is good, evens out somewhat with the conversion drop, but still seeing a poor eCPC with the traffic from position 1.

Moving forward I need to move my ads from Position 1 to 2<>3 so hopefully I can increase conversions and drop my CPC even further. However I've been tweaking my bids a lot, a few times a day, so I'm going to let things rest for a bit to help build up my history.

I've been seperating out my high performing keywords and tweaking things, and as others mentioned now that most the adgroups are performing well its "buoying" the rest of the campaign and now all my adgroups are doing well and CPC is dropping on everything. I'm going to keep creating adgroups for my best keywords and teaking my existing ones before scaling up.

[AgentPaul001]

Well.....I'm absolutely dominating my keyword grouping right now. Most of my competition is targetting a much wider keyword set so I'm able to really kick their ass with my 50 or so keywords. I'm getting an aggressive payout so that helps, but I'm still suprised at how well I'm doing.

Its been a few weeks, maybe I'll get google slapped right when I'm finally breaking even. Although my LPs are unbelievably superior to the others in terms of content. Possibly the best LP I've ever done in terms of funneling users to the offer yet actually providing "value" to visitors.

Its been a few weeks now and my quality scores are great. I've now got great QS on almost all of my "secondary" keywords as well. My CPC continues to drop its held steady at a really lower level the past couple days, and hopefully it'll start dropping again soon since I need a little more wiggle room before this offer will be profitable.

Anyways, better keyword grouping has helped a lot although I still have a lot of my keywords lumped together.

Just torn between adding a bunch of longtail keywords OR continuing to concentrate on whats performing well. My longtail keywords haven't done all that well, however I've not spent much time optimizing for them either :|

[mystickcal]

Well.....I'm absolutely dominating my keyword grouping right now. Most of my competition is targetting a much wider keyword set so I'm able to really kick their ass with my 50 or so keywords. I'm getting an aggressive payout so that helps, but I'm still suprised at how well I'm doing.

Its been a few weeks, maybe I'll get google slapped right when I'm finally breaking even. Although my LPs are unbelievably superior to the others in terms of content. Possibly the best LP I've ever done in terms of funneling users to the offer yet actually providing "value" to visitors.

Its been a few weeks now and my quality scores are great. I've now got great QS on almost all of my "secondary" keywords as well. My CPC continues to drop its held steady at a really lower level the past couple days, and hopefully it'll start dropping again soon since I need a little more wiggle room before this offer will be profitable.

Anyways, better keyword grouping has helped a lot although I still have a lot of my keywords lumped together.

Just torn between adding a bunch of longtail keywords OR continuing to concentrate on whats performing well. My longtail keywords haven't done all that well, however I've not spent much time optimizing for them either :|

If you do decide to add some more keywords, I would add them to a completely separate campaign not just ad group to make sure they don't mess with your other keywords.

[AgentPaul001]

*UPDATE*

Okay I didn't do what you said and it hurt :P I went ahead and added a bunch of keyword longtail & also new subniches, and it hurt big time.

1) Didn't impact existing bids.
2) New keywords placed ranked really high right off the bat even against tough competition.
3) However the keywords didn't perform and CPC was really high.

Basically I've just confirmed everything you guys have told me, once you have an established account Adwords "trusts" that you can strongarm your way into a niche, however you still have to perform like every other advertiser or your going to be pushed out eventually.

Rather then wait for things to die down, I just paused the adgroup, and I've continued to drop bids, target more effectively, just overall tweak things.

It has been two weeks I think, and almost breaking even. I'm going to just keep tweaking for the next week and hopefully I'll manage to at least recover my losses. I don't think I'll be in this niche long even with all this work, so I'm going to summarize everything that happened once I make my cash back & my campaign dies, so few weeks likely :P

This whole campaign is basically just meet seeing if I can compete in Adwords since at least its a structured environment unlike the wild west/ppc hell that is YSM.