• Add negative keywords
• Isolate and bid separately on long tailed keywords
• Get a feeling of what searchers was looking for and detect patents I could use for new campaigns

Google’s interface

Since that time Google’s interface have challenged my decision with problems like:

• I have to filter the search terms, so I only see search terms that isn’t keywords all ready
• If I don’t add the search term as positive or negative keywords, it will show up every time I sort the search terms
• I have to count if a search terms have more than 80 characters or 10 words. If I miss a word I have to find it in a list of 500 search terms to upload my sorting
• If I use short lists, they will fill up with search terms I can’t sort and if I use long lists I use long time to find errors that prevent me uploading.
• If search term have a forbidden word, I need to ask for an exemption/review or delete it. That option just doesn’t work sometimes (if to many words need exemption)
• If I select all search terms and then deselect search term, I don’t want to add as search keywords, when Adwords have been selecting the search terms I had been deselecting, when I scrolled (both when I could see it and when it was out of sight)
• Etc.

Our approach

Sorting your search terms leads directly and indirectly to great results. So the question is how do we take the pain out of the process and make it a fast process. Here are some of the things we did:

• Remove the search terms that have more than 80 characters or 10 words (no more counting)
• Remove all search term you have already made a decision about what to do with (only sort a search term once)
• Presort the search terms in two lists: One, we call promising, which have search terms that are similar to the keywords, you are using in your adgroup and unsorted, which are search terms we don’t know or we don’t see as a good fit
• Setting the search terms in alphabetical order, because if the search terms start with the same word, you can concentrate on the last part of the keyword
• Make it possible to sort with your keyboard, because it is not a training section of your motor skills
• Not showing statistic, so you only have to concentra if it is a relevant keyword
• Have a default match(s) type
• No scrolling
• Adding negative and positive keywords at the same time
• Search the keyword in Google inside the sorting interface
• Etc.

Our tests have shown that users use 5 times less time compared with the Google interface. We are still working on bringing time further down and quality up.

This is how you sort with the tool:

• You make an account, connect it with your Google Ads account.
• You can either download your search terms at Campaigns level (By selecting a campaign and click on “Import search terms for all Ad Groups” ) or at Ad Group level (by selecting a adgroup and click on “Import words => Adwords search terms”.
• Before you importing the search terms, you need to decide the time interval. I always choose “all time” and the match type you want the search terms to be added as. You can choose several.
• Click import and start sorting

This is how you sort:

Left arrow <= Will add the search term as positive search keyword
Right arrow => Will add the search term as a negative keyword
Zero “0” Will add the search term as a paused keyword (so you don’t have to sort the keyword again. It is for keywords you don’t want as positive or negative keywords)
Arrow up and down Will change which keyword you sort.
Space will search the keyword in Google

Tips:

You can sort using your mouse (it is much slower for most tasks)

What if you could start making an optimized one keyword ad group for all of your keywords, even the long tailed ones?

This is what we have made a tool to do. Let’s go through how it works:

First I am going to assume you have made a list of the most important keywords and sorted them into lists of similar kind, meaning or what else makes sense.

Start with inserting two/three lists:

If you use the “Add multiple lines” you are able to copy/paste the whole list. Name the list something short.

The tool will take all the combinations and make one ad group, with only one keyword.

Match types
Choose which match type you like. In each ad group there is only one keyword, but you can have that keyword in different Match types (we don’t recommend broad match, but tacking all the other works fine).

Ads
Now you can make your ads as you are used to, with one exception. You have the ability to insert the keywords in the list
You can insert the words from the lists into the ads. You do that by writing the list name like this: {ListName}

You can control the upper and lower case by writing the list name like this:

• {listname} => All letters in lower case
• {Listname} => First letter upper case
• {LiStname} => Lower and upper case as in the list

When you have made one ad, you can click new and try to improve it in a new ad.

Tips:

• Use the arrows to go through some of the ads to see if they read well with the keywords.Insert the keywords many places, but don’t overdo it.
• Good places are in the first headline, part1, part2 and the description.
• Make one ads where all the character limit are kept. When you combine the two longest keywords from the two lists, you will often break the limitation. That is ok, the tool will just not make the ads that break the limitation.

This is an overview article about keyword research. It is supported by articles that dig deeper. All advice have been tested, found successful and is used as best practice.

This article will be updated with new information.

What is a keyword?
Let’s start to define what we are talking about (if you are an expert, you can use it to link to, when you need to explain it to others).
A Search Term is what a searcher have written in the search box. A keyword is what tricks your ad in Google Ads or the organic search results. If most of you search terms in Google Ads are similar to keywords, when you are targeting very precise.
A keyword can contain one or several words. If you want to emphasise that your keywords consist of more than one word, you can call it a keyword phrase.
A negative keyword is a keyword that you don’t want your ads show for.

How to find the best keywords
If you have a business, then a good keyword is one you can make money on and a negative keyword is one that you lose money on.
You spot a good keyword by reading it. If the searcher have a problem, you can solve with a product/service and they are ready to pay for it, then it is a good keyword. The profit is mostly made in the long tail, where the searchers are very specific in what they wants and are standing with the money. The second part is analysing if you can compete with the competitors.
The best method to do that, is to try to compete in Google Ads. Don’t fall for short cuts as Keyword Effectiveness Index that doesn’t work. If you don’t have a big budget, when start with the most promising keywords.
Don’t forget to specify the negative keywords. It is often around 40% of an account performance you can get with a well developed negative keyword list.

How to start the keyword research
If you’re starting all over with nothing, a 10 minute old fashioned brainstorming, is a great start.
If you have access to a working Google Analytics, Google Console and Google Ads account and all accounts have a decent amount of traffic, then I would start downloading the keyword lists from there.
After you download them, there are difference method to process them. The traditional method is to sort the keywords i 3 lists. The keywords you want to have your ads show for(positive), don’t want you ads shown for (negative) and don’t want to target (pause). It can be done in a spreadsheet or our sorting tool.
The other method is to identify single words in lists, that can be combined to targeted one keyword ad groups in a tool.
If you think your keyword lists is incomplete, you can find lists of keywords within your business. You can also use the Google keyword tool, that gives related keywords, to the keywords you input. It can be very time consuming, so we built a tool that can sort 5 times fast.

How to use your superior keyword research
The reason you are putting all this effort in keyword research is to improve Google Ads account. The main effects are:

• Negative keywords: You stop using money on keywords that aren’t relevant for you.
• Positive keyword: By specifying the positive keywords, you can differentiate your bids, so the keywords that gives the most value gets the highest bids.
• Ads: You can write ads that offer exactly what the search wants
• Landing pages: Since you know what searchers are looking for, what their pains are and you have specified the keywords, so you can send them to an optimized landing page.
• Quality score: Not only do you get real improvements, but Google also gives you cheaper click prices and a bigger market share, because you have improved CTR, Ad and landing page relevance.

To get the full benefit of your keyword research, you should make ad groups with just one keyword in each. Then you can optimize everything. We made a tool so you can make thousand of optimized ad groups in 5 minutes.

So why don’t you start making the ultimate Google Ads campaign?

Usually the answer is a variation of lack of time and skills.

Before going into how this can be done, without to much time and skill, we can look at what you gain:

• High quality score, impression share and conversion rate
• Low CPC and bounce rate
• Low management cost
• Lower skill and concentration level needed

Which all adds up to a large profitable market share.

By building the ultimate long tail Google Ads campaign, you get high performance from the beginning. I use less time building campaigns this way, than with the traditional methods and the time used on maintenance is much less.

Everybody in the industry is concerned with in/outsourcing and their job being taken over by someone else. If you make a very targeted campaign with thousands of targeted ad groups, it becomes difficult to take over by someone else.

Why does long tail campaigns perform better?

There are two reasons. One is that you can optimize the whole customer experience to maximize the chance getting a conversion and the other has to do with getting Google to love you.

Optimizing the customer experience
Search keywords vs. search terms: Keywords are what activate your ads and search terms are what the searcher have write in the search box. If keywords and search terms are very similar, then you have a lot of control. You can send the searcher directly, where they can solve their problem and convert. You can also have a low bid on low performing keywords and a high bid on high performing keywords, instead of an average bid on a main keyword. That way you can get a larger share of the good customer and let your competitors have a bigger share of the less attractive customers. Best of all is that Googles automatics bidding engines work very well with targeted Ad Groups, so you don’t have to use time on adjusting bids.

How often haven’t you hear, that customers are becoming less loyal, more expensive and difficult to convert? Maybe it is just a competitor that is vacuuming Google for the best customers and are able to do so by being real good at targeting.

Ads: By knowing exactly what the customers are searching for, you are able to address it in the ad. If the searchers are looking for a “cheap leopard cover for Samsung s8” you can write: “Choose between 5 leopard cover for Samsung s8, starting at 99¢” instead of something more general like: “See our many colored and pattern covers for your mobile”.
You should improve CTR significant and thereby get a larger market share. Because you are saying precisely what you are offering, you conversion rate will also increase (if they don’t have 99¢ and want a leopard cover for Samsung s8, they don’t click your ad).

Landing page: With long tail keyword bidding, you already select the searcher that is the most valuable. They have decided if they like your offer before they click on your ad. So you are left with very targeted and highly valuable customers. So your job is just to close the deal. If you are selling mobile covers, then it is just to show the 5 leopard cover for Samsung s8, starting at 99¢. One easiest method of marking targeted landing pages is to use filters. If you use the filter option in your cover-shop, you choose to show covers for: Samsung s8, leopard pattern and sorted after price ascending.

Optimizing for quality score
Even quality score is just a mark given by Google, that determine how often your ads will be shown, it also has real life effect on how much you pay per click. If you have a keyword with quality score of 1 and you changes it to a quality score of 10. Google will let you pay app. 8 times less per click.

So if you have a quality score of 10 and pay 1 USD per click and your competitors with a quality score of 1, have to pay more than 10 USD to to gets his ad shown before yours.

So even you improve nothing else that quality score, you can save large sums of money by improving your quality score.

How quality score are calculated
Google Ads quality score consists of 3 components:

• Landing page experience
• Ad relevance
• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR)

Each component is marked with:

• Below average
• Average
• Above average.

The quality score formula looks like this:

Quality score = 1 + Landing page experience + Ad relevance + Expected clickthrough rate (ECTR)

Points are given like this:

If you get “above average” i all components you get: Quality score = 1 + 3.5 + 2+ 3.5 = 10

Let go through how a long tail campaign builder improve quality score.

Expected clickthrough rate (ECTR): To improve ECTR, you need to improve CTR. If you have a good product, CTR is always high if your ads only appear in front of interested potential customers and suggest a good solution to their problem.
The best method to control who sees the ads is with many long tail keywords and many negative keywords. If you only have one specific target in each ad group, you are able to link to the page that solve the problem and suggest the solution in the ad.

Ad relevance: You get a long way, if you use the same words in the ads, the searcher have used. If competition is high, you also need to match intention. If the searcher is looking for information and your are offering a product or the user is looking for a product and you are offering a service, you didn’t match the intention. Not only does a mismatch of intentions gives a low CTR and conversion rate, but it also hurts your quality score.
You can only match the intention by targeting very precise and act on the information you get.

Landing page experience: It is a bit like ad relevance, where you need to match words and intention. If competition is hard, you might have to optimize your landing page as you do for SEO. If you get organic ranging for the same keywords, as you use in Google Ads, when you should be alright.

Help us give our new Google Ads tool a test drive here (Yes it is the best tool to make target Ad Groups)

How quality score is calculated
There is consensus among experts, that Adwords calculate a more detailed quality score internally. For the purpose of optimizing your Adwords account, the quality score you are given, is sufficient. If you want to go even further, beyond a quality score of 10,  seen what works and do more of the same.

Her is the formula of how quality score is calculated:

Quality score formula:

Quality score = 1 + Landing page experience + Ad relevance + Expected clickthrough rate (ECTR)

Each component are given a value if you are below, above or average compare to the competitors for that keyword:

How to improve quality score for expected clickthrough rate (ECTR)
Expected clickthrough rate is an estimation, so even if Adwords don’t have data for CTR for that keyword, they are still able to make some kind of estimation. If they have lots of historic CTR data then ECTR is approximately equal to CTR.

Adwords can look at historic CTR for the ad group, similar ad groups, the campaign, similar campaigns, all similar types campaigns, the account. They can even look at other account that are using a similar approach as you are to calculate ECTR.

If you want to improve ECTR you need to improve CTR. The most common methods are:

• Make better ads
• Split ad groups into more specific ad groups, so you can make ads that is tailored to the users search term and intention
• Make better and more specific landing pages, so you can make better and more specific ads
• Make a offer searchers can’t say no to
• Do anything to get CTR up

If you give searchers what they want, they rewards you with a high CTR.

How to improve quality score for ad relevance
A quick fix is to use the keyword in the ad text, but there is more that goes into this variable. Google also analyze the intentions, so if you say “buy this” and the user search for “how to fix”, you might want to have you ads say something like “How to fix…by buying…

How to improve quality score for landing page experience
This is a lot like SEO a page for onpage factors. Like the ads it helps if you use the search term and match the intention. Google are probably using the ranking factor from there search results to decide the quality score for landing page experience. The important here is that you are not competing against all relevant pages on the the web, but only the one that are willing to pay for clicks through Adwords.
Bounce rate and time on page is good factures to optimize for, among the many onpage components that Google take into account.

Strategies to improve quality score
We use two main strategies to improve quality score. The first is to optimize for the low hanging fruits in the existing structure and the other is to make a new Adwords structure that is optimized for quality score.

Optimizing an existing Adwords structure for better quality score
We alway start with the landings pages. We know it is the achilles heel for most Adwords specialist, because it is usually a slow process to have the site changed, especially if you are working with big clients.

If you have good landing pages and you are not competing against super optimized Adwords competitors, it should be easy to get a quality score close to 10. You do that by:

• Specify the demand in many thousand keywords (use search terms to find them)
• Add negative keyword (ex. So you don’t get “how to” traffic to a product page)
• Make small very targeted ad groups, so you can write very targeted ads

Most of the work getting a perfect quality score, is done at the landing pages. You can still try to promise a little more, than you can keep, in the ads, but it is not something we recommend if you have other options.

Marking a perfect structure for optimizing the quality score
Imagine you have a long tail keyword and you want to get a perfect 10. So you make an ad group with just one keyword, so you can make very targeted ads. You also make a landing page that is only focused on solving the searchers problem, that use the long tail keyword. You add background information, video, a special offer that is too good to turn down. Because you made such a good landing page, it is easy to write an ads that stand out. You get a high CTR and a high ad relevance, when it compete against ads that is more general in their message. It is because the searches know they can solve their problem fast and easy, when you are able to articulate their problem in the ad.

To do one long tail keyword at the time just take to long time. What you need is a system that works at scale.

Let’s say you have a webshop and in that you have a filter. The webshop is selling spare parts for cars. You make a spreadsheet with a list of the difference options:

Now you make ads that is combinations of the difference lists. Her are some examples:

As you might see from the final URL, we use a category pages as landing pages, where we have filtered the results, so we get the products the searcher is searching for. If we show a picture of the car model, write some text about choosing the right spare part, add instructions with video etc. we have a pretty good landing page.
Because of the very specific ads, we get a great CTR and ad relevance. The landing page will not only get a high quality score, but also convert well, because all good options and information are served on a silver platter.

If the competitors are not doing the same thing, we should have a perfect quality score, which we can use to get low CPC and a high impression share. The high CTR and conversion rate insure a big market share.

Imagine that you are in charge of a night club. Right now you are letting people in the club based on the principle: First in line – first in. We all admire this as a fair principle.
The problem is, if too many party killers and people who don’t spend money gets in the club. Those nights you will not be earning money and your club will get a bad image from the people who didn’t got a great night out.

Other nights, you get the right mix of people in your club and makes the best party ever, everybody spent 3 times more than they planned.
On the slow nights you notice many non-charming girls/men and lots of people that like to spit in a coke all night.
If you could just sort the crowd, you would be able to earn many times, what you’re earning now. This is what negative keywords is all about.

In PPC you are able to do just that. Before we go into more details about how it is best done, all the best practices, strategies and the default negative keywords list that we made for you, we want to talk a little bit about the benefits.

Benefits of negative keywords
If you have an average Adwords account and you haven’t added negative keywords yet. Then the best thing you could do, to get great results, within the shortest time possible, is to add negative keywords. In other words, you can save around 50% of all costs in an Adwords account just by adding negative keywords. Because you will:

• Save cost on unprofitable clicks
• Improve CTR, quality score, conversion rate, conversion value, average position, customer satisfaction and market share etc.
• Decrease CPC, bounce rate and conversion cost etc.
• Get a higher search share for profitable keywords
• Leave the unprofitable keywords to your competitors (you can almost hear them say: Competition is getting tough)
• Concentrate on making content for the profitable keywords

When to add negative keywords
We add negative keywords in three steps. How many negative keywords you should add depend on your market situation. If you are a small fish in a large lake, you should add lots of negative keywords. If you are a big fish in a small pond, it is worth testing out if some of the keywords really should be added as negative.
You might find some of the keywords that seems less relevant, have less competition and therefore low CPC to make up for low conversion rate.
Sometimes information searches have a terrible conversions rate if you use a product landing page, but if you lead it through a page that answers the question and make them realise that they need your product, it can be a goldmine.

General negative keywords
Some keywords are just unprofitable for most advertisers. It is usually support request, job seekers and informations seekers in a non buying phase etc.
You should start by adding negative keywords from a general negative keyword lists. I have added some negative keyword lists in the bottom of this article. I add them to a general keyword list in the shared library. Then I only need to maintain them in one place. Some general negative keywords only apply to some specific campaign and then you can make several negative keyword lists in the shared library.

It is possible to have a negative keyword list for all of your Adwords accounts, but I find that each account have a different approach and therefore we always go through the keywords to make sure we don’t add negative keywords that will harm the account.

Keyword research
Keyword research isn’t just finding the good keywords, but also finding the negative keywords that you don’t want to have your ads shown for.

Remember to think for which level you want to add the negative keywords. Sometimes it is easier to overview the effect, if you add the negative keywords, at a Campaign/Ad group level, but it takes less maintenance to do it in the shared library.

Search terms and other maintenance
When you go through your search terms, you will not only get a great insight of what potential customers are searching for and are able to add many razor sharp targeting, but this is also a great source for negative keywords. You will also be able to see the number of irrelevant clicks fall as you add more negative keywords.
If you have been sloppy in your keyword research and not been focusing on adding negative keywords. You will see it when you go through the search terms and be able to correct it.

When we take over a client from a lazy adwords agency, we always start over to get something usable, but the negative keywords, we get from the search term is always a goldmine that insures we can start generating better results from day one.

The only problem with finding negative keywords from search terms is that you only get search terms from clicks and not impressions (unless you already have the keyword in your account). I know you only pay per click, but CTR have such a big effect on click prices, that you pay indirect for impressions. Therefore your ultimate goal would be not to be shown for irrelevant search queries.

How to add negative keywords in Adwords
You have three options: The browser version of Adwords, Adwords editors and 3. party tools with API access to Adwords.

Best practice: Use the tool you are working in if it can do the job. Avoid adding keywords one by one if you have many. You can usually do the work much faster, when using Adword Editor or a 3.part tool.

You can add the negative keywords on four levels:

Ad group: If you only want to influence one ad group.

Campaign: If you want to influence all the ad groups in the campaign.

Shared library: Here you can have lists, where you can add the campaigns you like to influence.

MCC: Here you can have lists for several accounts.

Best practice: Use the shared library as the default option, because maintaining it will take a lot longer in the Ad group/Campaign level. If a negative keyword only apply in one Ad group or Campaign it makes good sense to apply it there.
When I sort search terms or other ways to do keywords research, I usually apply the negative keywords in Ad group/Campaign level. After that, I go through the list and add negative keywords to the shared library.

For me it doesn’t make sense to add negative keywords in the MCC level, because if it is negative for one client, it could be the main keyword for another. It does make sense for advertisers that have several accounts within the same industry.

Negative match type
To complicate things even more, you need to decide which match type to add your negative keywords in:

• Negative broad match: A broad negative keyword work like a modified broad keyword. All the words need to be in the search term, to be excluded.
• Negative phrase match: Is the same as broad match, plus Google require the order to be like in the negative phrase match keyword. Use only when order of keywords is important.
• Negative exact match: To be activated the search need to use the exact same keywords as you put in negative exact match.

Google don’t help with synonyms, singular or plural versions, misspellings etc. as they do in their positive counterparts.

Best practice: Use negative broad match unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

Lists of negative words
I usually go through through these lists, when I get a new account. All relevant negative keywords goes in the shared library. You can also go through the negative keywords from a similar client.

Job Seekers: I have seen a 20% drop in cost by just adding these keywords.

career
careers
employment
hiring
intern
interns
internship
internships
job
jobs
recruiter
recruiting
resume
resumes
salaries
salary

Information seekers: You usually need a special content strategy to convert them.

about
definition
diagram
example
examples
history
map
maps
sample
samples
what are
what is

Researchers: Might become super users of your website, but will not buy much.

association
associations
book
books
case studies
case study
guide
guides
journal
journals
magazine
magazines
metrics
news
research
review
reviews
statistics
stats
success stories
success story
tutorial
tutorials
white paper
white papers

Education: Do you provide that?

class
classes
college
colleges
course
courses
education
school
schools
training
universities
university

Bargain hunters: It is difficult, because it is a strong buying signal, but if you are not winning the price battle, because you are a premium provider, you might add these keywords. If you are not 100% sure, I would test them out to make sure.

bargain
cheap
clearance
close out
close outs
closeout
closeouts
discount
discounted
free
inexpensive
liquidation
odd lots
overstock
remainder
remainders

Price: Is usually some of the best keywords, because it is a strong buying signal. Only add them if you are selling product and service where the customers can’t afford them if they have to ask for the price.

price
prices
pricing
quote
quotes

DIY: Do you sell to people who are looking for inspiration to their next do-it-yourself-project?

diy
do it yourself
craft
crafts
create
creating
hand made
handmade
home
homemade
how to
make
making

Software: If you don’t use any of these keywords to get people in

burn
burner
cd
code
community
desktop
developer
developers
disk
download
downloads
dvd
error
file
files
forum
free
freeware
game
games
gnu
hack
hacks
libraries
library
microsoft
open source
public domain
retail
retail
retailer
retailers
shareware
shortcut
shortcuts
template
templates
tip
tips
video
windows

Manufacture: You might start with this list.

antique
consumer
export
exporter
exporters
hobby
import
importer
importers
measurement
model
models
regulations
rent
rental
repair
repairs
retail
retailer
retailers
rules
safety
specifications
specs
standards
store
toy
toys
used
vintage

Products materials: If you are not selling product of these materials.

aluminum
ceramic
cotton
fabric
glass
gold
iron
leather
metal
paper
plastic
rubber
silver
stainless steel
steel
stone
vinyl
wood

Law: Do you want people interested in legislation and regulations to click on your ad?

act
act of
compliance
law
laws
legal
legislation
regulation
regulations

Other:

club
clubs
consultants
consulting
gift
gifts
online
photo
photograph
photographs
picture
pictures
send
sending

Or even better. If you had a whole army equipped with mobile lie detectors that could get peoples a side in the moment they have to make a decision of whether to buy and what product to buy.

What if you could plug a wire into people’s head to get what they were thinking about.

To creepy. Try wireless, if you prefer.

Without doing this.

I know you are thinking: Too much noise.
But if you make a filter, so you only get the questions related to product-X, when they were in the buying process.

Ok it is not free, but if you use Adwords, you have already paid (you can also use suggestion).

How to use search terms

Search terms is basically what people want and think. I can’t think of anything more important when you want to optimize Adwords, keywords, ads, landing pages etc.

Let’s get a little more serious and go more in detail of how to use search terms in the optimizing process.

Maintenance
You set up your target like the keywords in search, Urls in dynamic ads and products in shopping. Now it is time to see if you are pulling the right kind of customers in.

You do that by sorting the search terms. Your goal is:

Negative keywords
Adding negative keywords, so you don’t have to pay non potential customers. You should be able to save XX percent of your cost.

Specifying keywords
One keyword might activate thousand of search terms, some of them might be very valuable others may not. Some might have a high CPC others may not. You want to bid the right amount based on value/cost. By making the good search terms to keywords, you will have the data to optimize your bidding.

Ads
When you know what people wants, it is easy to write good ads. My ads often sucks, when I am not sure what people want and almost always good when I know what they want.

Landing pages
Same as with the ads. When you know what people wants, it is easier to write landing pages that converts.

Quality score
If there is a magic bullet to improve quality score, it is definitely the search terms. The process of adding negative and specifying positive keywords will take you a long way. If you do the whole process well with ads and landing pages, you should get close to a perfect 10.

Knowing your customers
Every day you make hundreds of small decisions, that either lead to success or failure. Knowing what you customers wants, should make the decisions easy.

I have never seen this process done without leading to big improvements, but you will learn all the time and at one point you probably need to update your Adwords structure.

When you have been maintaining your Adwords account by sorting your search terms for some time, you find that your ads and ad groups are too broad targeted.
The classic method to solve the problem is to split the ad groups into more targeted ad groups. Adwords will promote this solution in the opportunities tab. To get full effect, you need to incorporate the new more target keyword into a more target message in the ads and landing page.

SKAG Campaign Builder

It can be time consuming to split ad groups many times. One way to save time and get better results is to use SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group) ad group. It sound scary for most people to have one ad group for each keyword, but when you try it, it is actually a simpler process.

When you start with more general targeted ad groups and split them into more targeted ad groups, it is a creative process. But with this, as many creative processes, it is time consuming and take a high level of skills and concentrations.

The SKAG method is more structured. It does take some moment where you need to be very creative, but after that, it is full speed ahead.

Without explaining how to make efficient SKAG campaigns in details, I will just outline the most important aspects in relation to search terms.

When you organize your keywords for a SKAG campaign, you write lists of keywords that can be inserted into ad text in the same place.

Like “Cheap cover for your black Moto Z” or “Cheap battery for your red OnePlus 5” after the form “Cheap “Accessory” for your “Color” “Mobile””.

By combining your keyword lists to get SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Groups) ad groups. You will be able to make many very target ad groups like the “cover/black/Moto Z adgroup” with ex. The keyword: +cover +black +Moto Z, ad which directly message: “Cheap cover for your black Moto Z” and a landing page where you only show black covers to Moto Z.

So why this is important in relation to search terms?
Sorting your search terms is kept to a minimum. Since you have only one keyword in your SKAG and it is in exact/phrase/modified broad match, you only get search terms that include your one keywords. The added keywords can either be added to the SKAG (which then will be a bit more specified) or part of the keyword can be added to a negative keyword list.

Since you made your keywords almost equal to your search terms, you should get a perfect quality score. It is because of a very high CTR (the ad text can be almost what the customer want), the ad and landing page can be very relevant. All resulting in a high quality score.

You don’t need to split ad groups, since it is difficult to make ad groups with less than one keyword. You might find extra keywords in you search terms, that you can insert in your list and generate x number of new ad groups.

As you can see it is important to distinguish between keywords and search terms in your Adwords account.

• Keyword: A keyword is what trick your ad in Adwords
• Search term: Is what the searcher have written in the search box

Adwords used to make it very difficult to find search terms, hidden away in a drop-down menu. Now you find it to the right of the search keywords.

Why should you sort the search terms?
I used to gain a 400% improvement by sorting the search terms. Nowadays other agencies are a lot more thorough and the gain have drop to around 100%.

Here is what you get from sorting your search terms

Negative keywords
The main gain is thought adding negative keywords. Because you can see what people where actually searching for (“Danish Swedish”= keyword vs. “Danish–Swedish Farmdog” = search term). I add unwanted search terms under each Ad Group and take out specific keywords and add them on campaign or account level as negative keywords.

Understanding what potential customers want
Going through the search terms tells you what people want. Keywords tells you the subject; Search terms tells you their questions and demand.

If you can tap into you customers mind-set, you can design the customers journey, launch new products successfully, avoid 90% + of all questionnaires and a whole lot of other business decisions become easy, when you know what potential customers want.

Exact keywords
Sorting search terms become adding 98% of them as keywords in exact match (I also like to insert the new keywords in modified broad) after some time of developing the negative keyword lists. By doing that you know more specific what exact keywords people are using and are able to take action to optimized everything better. It become less of a question of what to do and more a get to work and do it.

If we add “farmdog” as a negative keyword, in our example, we immediately save 80% of the cost. We also improve the general quality score of the account. The biggest gain is then you start understand what searchers want and are able to give it to them. Not only do you get a high CTR and a low CPC, but you also gain a big market share.

Adwords also gives better ranking and low click price if you have the keyword as an exact match.

Broader aim
When you sort search terms for unwanted traffic, you can start aiming broader and get the difficult to get traffic without all the traffic that don’t convert.

Quality score
After some time I usually see average quality score get close to 10 if the site can match the traffic. When I add search terms as keywords they get a high quality score right away. I believe it is because there are similar keywords with high quality score and CTR is very high for most search terms.

When you analyze the quality score, remember to adjust the columns in Adwords, so you specify the 3 elements. It makes it much easier to analyse what to do.

The account quality score is also improved by adding all the irrelevant keywords into the negative keyword lists.

Adwords Conversion Optimizer
When you are doing your keyword research, including sorting your search terms, Conversion Optimizer can do wonder for you. Adwords also say that they are investing significantly in improving their automatic bidding system.

Most of the time I see an improvement of 5-30% by adding Conversion Optimizer(or one of the other bidding metric) to do my bidding, but the real advantage is the time saved by adjusting bids on many thousand keywords.

By sorting your search terms, you are helping Conversion Optimizer to do a better job, by providing lots of keywords to optimized.

Organic traffic spillover
Over the last years Google have become increasingly good at weed out spam results. The cost have been the long-tail results. One way to get the valuable long tail traffic, is to use Adwords by pointing long tail keywords with relevant ads/pages. That way you are giving user data to Google that you page attracts searchers with a high CTR and they find your page relevant, which result in high-ranking.

Conclusion
By giving people what they are searching for, the easiest way possible, is a sure way to make them happy. Happy people convert and come back. To be able to give people what they are searching for, you need to know their search terms.

I say that if anyone says that the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is great to find good keywords/search terms, without explaining any of the drawbacks, then they are either out to cheat you or they just don’t know any better.

Definition: Keyword effectiveness index: A mathematical representation of the popularity of a keyword measured in number of searchers (demand), compared to its popularity measured as the number of pages in a search engines index (supply).

Description: KEI is a statistical formulation that reveals the most effective keyword phrases and terms to use in optimizing your web pages for. Efficiency can be many things. According to KEI, it is efficient to optimize for keywords that have many searchers, but only a few competing pages.

The lower the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. That means that you might have a better chance of getting to the top in the search engines and receive a good number of searchers for your effort.

Example: Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 821 per day and Google displays 224,234 results (pages) for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is:

224,234 divided by 821. In this case, the KEI is 273.

Example on the opposite: Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 2 per day and Google displays 11,224,234 results (pages) for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is:

Explanation: According to the KEI definition, the best keywords are those that have many searches and that don’t have much competition in the search results. A low KEI is therefore preferable.

In our example, it is clear that the keyword with a KEI of 273 sounds as a good keyword to optimized a pages for. It is just as clear, in the example on the opposite, that the keyword that has lots of competitors and a low number of searchers which gives a KEI equal to 5,612,117 is a tough fight for a small prices (unless the two searchers are very valuable;-).

However, the KEI make no statement about the quality of the competition. While there might only be a few competitors in the search results, these competitors could be big players with big SEO teams, quality content and thousands of back links.

The number of search results can’t really tell you whether it is easy to get your web site listed in the top 10 results for that keyword or not. It’s much easier to move your web site from position 20,000 to position 12,000 than from position 190 to position 6.

In addition, the KEI factor is not a scientific number. It is more like a rule of thumb.

We will expect:

• The KEI for a keyword to increase if its popularity increases. Popularity is defined as the number of searchers.
• The KEI for a keyword to decrease if it becomes more competitive. Competitiveness is defined as the pages in the search engines index.

As a general rule, it isn’t advisable to select or deselect keywords wholly on the basis of numbers like KEI.

A better metric would be relevancy. Some of your keywords you are able to rank for in the search engines and other will give your users a good experience.

History: There haven’t been many successful metrics that have been calculated by two or more variables. The Keyword effectiveness index has been the most successful.

Future: There is a need for more useful variables in SEO and I predict there will come many in the future.

How to practice: When you have a keyword phrases, with a high, medium or low KEI, you need to be able to answer: Is there a reason why the KEI might be giving an incorrect picture?

There can be many reasons why KEI are showing you something you can’t use. Here are some of the reasons:

1. The position of the words in the keyword phrases is unnatural.
   Ex. “keyword report” has 534,000 pages in Google’s index, and the more unnatural “report keyword” has 29,100 pages. This doesn’t mean there is 18 times less competitions for “report keyword”.
2. More words in a keyword phrase means a much smaller changes to find them in a webpage.
3. Search engines don’t give the accurate number of pages in their index.
4. The number of searchers isn’t an accurate number and some keywords are inflated by the use of automated tools.

By blindly using KEI to select keywords, you run the risk to select keywords that have words in an unnatural order, long keyword phrases and where automated tool inflate the search numbers. Not good if you were looking for keyword phrases with little competition and many searchers.

Tips: Always ask yourself if there is a good reason why a keyword phrase has a low number, before you get all excited.

Some keyword phrases convert badly to customers and therefore it is easier to rank for. Do you want to put a big effort to rank for low value keywords?

Links: Keyword, Keyword Demand, Keyword Phrase, Search term, Negative keyword.

Conclusion: Use Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) carefully. Is there any reason why KEI shows it is a good keyword to use, but it is not?

What is your experience with Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)?
Do you like to use Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)?
Do you have any alternative methods to find good keyword/search phrases?

Alternative to KEI: I like to use Adwords for keyword research. I can test thousand of keywords and get CTR, conversion rate and the most precise number of searchers etc.(I could calculate Keyword Value = Number of Searcher * CPC). When I have my list of worthy keywords, I can go to the results page to see if the results are relevant and something I would be able to compete with.

Every Adwords expert know, that they could do much better, if they had more time and resources.

Adwords is already doing a lot of automatizing like: Including your ad in the auction, even you don’t have a keyword for misspell/plural/etc., enhance your bid for keywords where the searcher have been on your site before, show your better performing ads more and let your use Conversion Optimizer to make the optimal bid for every possibility for an ad impression etc.

All Adwords experts have also tried to export data into a spreadsheet, analyze it and made adjustments. Then sitting back and wonder about how hundreds of similar tasks would help and then try to figure out how to maintain the changes.

We are working on automation and semi-automate a lot of these takes in our new version of our Adwords tool. Here are some examples:

Out of stock, 404 page or a page that isn’t available
We all know there is a problem when: Some of the landing pages is downloading very slow, products are out of stock or some other problem.

Because it is a temporary problem, you consider, if it is worth your time to fix it. If it is, you need to locate how big a problem it is (one or million of pages) and deal with it. When the problem have been fixed, you need to turn everything back on.

The threshold of what is worth your time is quite high. In a large e-commerce site you could probably be doing it all day for out of stock products and not even consider products that have low stock.

Our solution:
We are testing a one button solution, where you can pause all ads that lead to a page that don’t show.

If you have an ecommerce site, you might want to stop using your money to send people to products that are out of stock.

Which kind of keywords are performing for you
Most Adwords professionals have tried to order the keywords in Adwords editor and paused the keyword with lowest quality score. Filter keywords with no conversions and order them after cost, to find the keywords who drain the budget without giving conversions.

The problem is that it is time consuming and to advance for average apprentice to analyze the data. But what if you had a whole team of experts that could do the number crunching for you? What would you ask them to do?

• Find patterns of underperforming parts of your Adwords account and make suggestion of how to fix it.
• Find overperforming parts of your Adwords account and make suggestion of how to expand them.

Underperforming parts could be keywords with low CTR, high cost per conversion/no conversion and low ad relevance quality score. Chances are that this group either need some work or need to be put into negative/paused keywords.

Our solution:
Our data say that you should built Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAG), to be able to target precisely and pick the most profitable keywords. The problem is that it is difficult and time consuming to do manually.

What routine tasks would you automate?