Hi everyone, Regina here with Starter PPC. Today I want to go through some and search term management strategies. We did a big search term and keyword cleanup last week on one of our new clients. So I want to walk through first the results of our changes and then show you what we changed and how we thought about the changes and even technically how we did the changes. So let's get started. first of all, This is what we're seeing from the results. So we made the changes on August. 23rd. Right now I have the dates of August 23rd to 28th, which is today pulled up and then I'm comparing it with the previous period, the 17th through the 22nd. The return on ad spend went up by 22%, even though the amount of conversions went down and the amount of conversions went down just because the cost actually slowed, which is a whole separate thing. We slowed the cost on purpose, which slows the conversions, but the return went up. And let's see the cost per click actually went up by 5%. And I know that you're all thinking, Oh no, that's a bad thing. Cost per click. Why would you want to spend more when you're dealing with quality issues, which is really common, right? When you first launch a new account. You want to pay more per click, right? Because it's those cheap clicks that are going to waste money. It's those cheap clicks in the beginning where Google is going to go, how do I fix my chicken coop type of keyword that is super not competitive. And Google is going to think. I'll just fill this placement by getting sponsored ad click here and making my commission, right? Whereas Google knows that no one's actually looking for anything to buy. There's no reason to show an ad on that keyword and it probably should just stick with organic results, but Google doesn't care. Google wants to show sponsored results, fill placements wherever it can and collect their money. spending a little bit more on cost per click in the beginning is usually our goal. It's later once we have high quality conversions that we're then trying to fine tune. And at that point, if we can find little ways to cut costs in the cost per click, that makes sense. Let's see, click through rate went down. It's actually a little bit strange to me. But, not all the numbers align every time. Because there's just too many factors to have it all be perfect. Conversion rate went up, which makes sense because we fixed the keywords and now we're going after, high intent shoppers and bidding on keywords that are more relevant to us. So click through rate went up, conversion rate went up 12% on the site. I'm gonna show you first in the change history on this day, August 23rd, we made 1,400 keyword changes. Not really. When you make a keyword change and then you apply it to multiple campaigns or multiple ad groups, it in the change history, it makes a log for each campaign or each ad group. It just looks like a ton. We didn't do that many. I could be wrong about 30 We didn't really make 1, 400 keyword changes. In this account, is an e commerce company, they sell plants delivered to you online, and they sell fruits. And they really specialize in exotic fruits. So they're selling the fruits from exotic plants and exotic fruit plants, right? So you'll see that in every campaign we have the nursery side of the business and the fruit side of the business. We've got a PMAX feed only campaign for the fruits, Then we have standard shopping. And within here, we actually have two ad groups nursery versus fruits, and we split those out in ad groups because oftentimes we want to try manipulate the bids on each ad group. For example, let's say. Google is spending 80 percent of the money on fruits and only 20 percent on the nursery. And the client says, Hey, actually we make a lot higher margin whenever we sell a plant. So can we try to just push a little bit more budget into the plants plants ads, and that's the way that we do it. So we have two different ad groups in there and we can say, okay, Google, let's say I see that you're spending an average, this is only one day's worth of data, and it's before we made the changes, so who knows if this is accurate. But just for example's sake, I see that you're spending an average of 13 cents per click on the nursery, go ahead and spend up to 15 cents if you want. And on the fruits, since we're trying to restrict the budget, that you're spending an average of 10 cents, go ahead and try to only spend eight cents per click. So we'll manipulate the budget that way by restricting, giving it more or less rope. Okay. Then we have an inbound search campaign just a search campaign. And then we have some video campaigns, both outbound and remarketing. So with inbound search, you have the ability to add keywords and you can add negative keywords, but on the shopping ads, you can only add negative keywords, right? There's no such thing as adding keywords on shopping ads, whether it's standard shopping or PMAX Google's going to choose what it's targeting for you. And the way. The way it chooses is it looks at your product feed and it looks at the product titles. It looks at the product descriptions and it makes a decision on what the keywords are based on mostly those two things. It also looks a little bit at the product landing page. So if you have like reviews on that page or other miscellaneous information about the product, it might use that as targeting ideas. Okay, so start by going into the search campaign because that is the one that we have the most control over, right? Because not only did we have to choose the keywords, we now need to make sure if our keywords are working, and then, update negative keywords in here. First thing I want to show you guys is this. Google is suggesting, hopefully, Why don't you add broad match keywords, get more conversions at a similar or better ROI by adding broad match versions of your existing keywords. And you actually get an 8 percent overall optimization score increase. optimization score is a math equation. It's basically them gamifying. Ways where they can make more money, not all of their suggestions are focused on them making money, but like most of them. So we tend to just dismiss these recommendations or just ignore them because adding broad match keywords is a terrible suggestion. We're already getting. irrelevant clicks. Why would we go more broad? Again, Google loves money. It loves filling placements. It loves more competition in more auctions, right? So the more eligibility it can convince you and your business to have on different keywords out there, especially the irrelevant ones. The higher the competition is, the higher the keywords get driven up. And the more commission Google makes on each click. I'm sorting by cost here. August 14th to the 23rd. These are the right. dates. So I'm going to start by cost because I want to see what are the ones that are wasting money the most, right? And I'm over in the search terms area. You guys search keywords are the ones that you've written. Search terms is what Google's actually bidding on, right? So I heart fruit box. First of all, that's just a competitor. So of course we're going to add that into the negatives. For this one, I would say broad match negative. Now think about it this way. If it's one word, like I heart fruit box is one word. There's no spaces in it. And you're adding it to the negatives as broad match. That means that Google cannot bid on anything with that word in it. So that's what broad match means. I want to caution you guys against adding two word keywords as broad match negative, because you're now excluding each of the words in your search term. As separate words that can't be used in any future searches. So broad match negative is a very powerful way of excluding future irrelevant searches, but you can also overdo it. So my rule of thumb is if you're adding. A negative keyword as broad match, just make sure it's a single word and you never want to show up for that word, no matter what, like in any sort of long tail, short tail, whatever. So this is a competitor keyword. We don't want to bid on competitor keywords. Why? Because most of the people that are looking for the competitor's name, they're not going to convert, right? The conversion rate is going to be really low. What are the chances that we're going to convince them to go with us instead of the competitor? Maybe. Maybe, but when you're a small business, you have better fish to fry, right? You have more low hanging fruit you can go after. I would say if you get up to the point where you're spending 60, 000 a month in ad spend, a hundred thousand dollars a month in ad spend, you might want to reconsider the competitor thing, maybe make a separate competitor campaign and really restrict the bids and the budgets on that. We can make that a video for a different day, but for small businesses, competitor keywords. Okay. Fruit tree nursery. So this is the nursery ad group. I would say this is not a great keyword. Because Someone who's looking for a nursery is probably wanting to walk into a nursery. Now it doesn't mean that for sure they're not going to be convinced to buy fruit trees on the internet but the intent really isn't high there, right? I would guess that 90 percent of people who are searching the internet for a nursery is going to click over to the maps and they're going to look for nurseries there then. So this is tough, you guys. Fruit tree nursery. I would be hesitant to exclude because you don't want to tell Google, for example, my first thought is, oh, we could add it as a. Phrase match negative a phrase match negative with the quotations around it means hey Google I don't want you to bid on keywords with the intent that you see here the intent being Someone looking for a nursery. Google's gonna be like, oh what if someone is searching for fruit tree nursery online or nursery for delivery, right? Those are super relevant to us. So I would be hesitant against even adding it as a broad, as a phrase match negative. For this, I would go back into the keywords and try to figure out what is causing it. Now I can see here that we actually have a broad match keyword called exotic fruit tree nursery. I don't think this is the best keyword. And I'm pretty sure that on this day, back on the 23rd, when we made all these changes, we already So we probably either paused it or we changed it. You don't want to bid on keywords for nurseries. If what you're selling is fruit tree delivery, right? We're not really a walk in brick and mortar nursery, which is a, like a store. We're actually an online nursery that delivers fruit trees to you. So the intent is just different. And I would. Re examine this keyword altogether, either pause it or change it. Like I said so we've gone through a couple of examples. Oh papaya, even though this is in the fruits and we do sell papaya, even if you're struggling with quality and you're seeing people searching for papaya, when what you sell is like papaya. Delivery or exotic fruit boxes, right? There are more higher intent keywords than papaya Maybe someone just wants to see a picture of papaya Maybe someone wants to see nutrition facts for papaya or recipes for papaya 99 of the people searching for papaya are not searching To have papaya delivered to them from the internet in a box to their homestead. So just higher intent keywords. And again, what keyword is this is causing this one fruits online? Okay, so google is taking our fruits online, which I think is a good keyword and making very wide reaching assumptions about that. So what do we do? You can Hi there. Quick interruption. Do you know the main thing that prevents small business owners from getting their Google ads account into a position to grow and scale budget? A lot of businesses, especially those that are just starting out have limited budgets, and so because of this, they're turned away by most ad agencies because most ad agencies have minimum budget thresholds that they're willing to work with. So what happens is the business owners end up learning. Google ads themselves. And the problem with that is that most of the advice online is geared towards larger accounts. And the advice doesn't have any of those strategies or tricks that can kickstart the algorithm into giving a small account a leg up over larger competitors. So it often just doesn't work. And the business just ends up losing money month over month. If this sounds familiar, starter PPC can help. We offer Google ads management services that are designed for accounts that have between 1000 and 5, 000 budgets. Because all of our clients are just starting out. We've come up with ways to keep our management fees significantly lower than most agencies, because we know that every dollar saved on management fees just goes towards the ad budget, which is going to help the algorithm gather speed and power. So if you're serious about growing your business and you'd like a team of Google ads experts to help you without breaking the bank, check us out at starter PPC. com. Okay. Back to the video. First of all, if you don't sell papaya, add papaya as a broad match negative, right? You never want the word papaya to ever be bid on again. And you can actually do that account wide by going to tools and settings and creating a negative keyword list that's campaign, account wide over there. Or you can do it on a campaign by campaign basis, or you can do it on an ad group by ad group basis. It doesn't really matter right now. I'm inside of a campaign. I didn't actually click into an ad group. So if I add a negative keyword here on this level, it's going to apply to the campaign. If you do sell papaya, but you're frustrated that Google is bidding on the word papaya, I would do two things. First of all, add papaya as an exact match. Negative exact match. Negative says, Hey, Google, if someone's searching for the word papaya, Just papaya, nothing else attached to the end of that keyword. I don't want to bid for that, right? So if it's happening again and again, whereas in this case it only happened once. So who knows if it'll ever happen again, but you could add it as an exact match negative. Also, I would do another thing. First of all, I would change the keyword from broad match to phrase match because right now fruits online, Google's going to take, like I said, very. wide reaching assumptions about our keyword and been on things like papaya because Google is going to go, Oh, that's a fruit and people are online. So that's the bad thing. So fruits online is a little bit too broad. So you can try a phrase match for frouche online. So go over to the keywords area and add quotation marks around it. That tells Google, I want the intent for fruits online. I don't know if that's going to do it in this case though. I just think like an algorithm after seeing it think for so long. And I know that it's gonna just still take wild assumptions based on that. So another thing you could do is instead of fruits online, right? Google is going to be like, Oh, they're online. You could say fruits delivery, right? Fruit boxes for delivery. Make it a little bit more specific, more long tail if you have to. If you guys are looking through your keywords and you're like, Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed. There's like thousands and thousands of keywords. Here's a good trick. First of all, pull up the columns that you want. In this case, I want cost and I want the keyword. And I'm going to click download it as a spreadsheet. like Google sheets, so I'm going to click on that. And what you can do is you can open this spreadsheet and sort by keyword. That way you can see, the 10 times that this keyword was used and what search terms matched up with it. And you can start to glean insights about which keywords are the most problematic. So you get the idea. You would sort by keyword and it's going to bunch all the search terms related to that keyword and you can be like, Oh, I see how the algorithm is thinking now. And then now you can see rare tropical fruit trees for sale phrase match was bid on twice. Rare tropical fruit trees in Fructoville. It's bidding on FructoVille. I would do a quick Google search for FructoVille and decide if FructoVille needs to be added as a broad match negative. I know this seems overwhelming, you guys, but once you do this a couple of times in the first few weeks it becomes a lot easier to manage. Because, especially if you know the broad match negative trick you will start to quickly see that things improve. And you'll get the types of results that I showed you in the beginning. Each time you're deciding on adding a negative again, you're just going to want to decide, does this apply to just the ad group, the whole campaign, or does it apply to the whole account? And then you're going to decide which level are you on when you add it, you can even open a new spreadsheet and make some categories for all the negatives that you're going to add, put phrases around them. If it's, if you want to add as a phrase match, exact match gets brackets, and then you can just copy and paste them when you're applying negatives. When it comes to shopping campaigns, you have a little bit of more restrictions. You can't edit the keywords, but it's actually okay. And I'll show you why that is. If you go over to the search terms area, you'll see that the algorithm is bidding on things like dragon fruit. Okay. So dragon fruit in an inbound campaign is not very relevant. Like I said, maybe someone's just searching for pictures of dragon fruit. Maybe somebody is wanting to find recipes of dragon fruit, but here in a shopping campaign, first of all, I don't have a great way of getting the algorithm not to bid on it. You can try to add dragon fruit as a negative keyword, but since we sell dragon fruit, it really wouldn't make sense to do that. I would say it's okay. It's okay. That the algorithm is choosing to do this these are shopping ads, right? So they can see that it's a product. They can see an image of the product. They can see it's a shopping ad in the shopping ad area, and the intent is higher. So if somebody's clicking on dragon fruit probably an 80 percent chance that they understand that this is a product on the internet and it's going to be delivered to them. In the form of dragon fruit in a box to their door if they click on it, right? So it's not going to really waste the money because people are just going to skip right over those shopping ads if they're not looking to buy dragon fruit on the internet. All right. This has been a crash course in how to manage keywords. I hope it's been helpful. If you like this video, don't forget to click subscribe and like below. And thanks for watching.