A Common Paid Search Mistake
August 12, 2010 
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A question that I am frequently asked is how someone can maximize their paid search account. It doesn’t matter if they are advertising on Google, Yahoo (now using Bing’s results), or Bing. While there are many ways for someone to get the best results out of pay per click advertising, there is one common mistake that I find in almost every account I look at. The enemy of every online marketer: High Cost Keywords. You would be surprised how many people start a new campaign or ad group without looking over the keywords to see how much they cost and how much traffic they may bring. This mistake is not just made with PPC novices, but also people and companies that have been doing it for a long time.
High cost keywords can destroy a well developed campaign in a matter of hours, fully depleting the daily spend and leaving your campaign paralyzed until the next day comes around. I tell everyone that I consult for to make sure and take a few extra steps to ensure that there are no high cost keywords hiding in their keyword builds. It is a simple thing to fix, but not many actually do it. There are many keyword estimation tools out there that can help you decide which keywords are right for you, but one of my favorite and easiest to use it the Google Keyword Estimator. This tool is free to use and can estimate cost and clicks for up to 5000 keywords per batch. Google has introduced a new beta for this tool, but I prefer to use the old legacy platform. After running a simple search, you can find out if the keywords that you want to use will be searched on and how much they will cost. Simple, effective, and will save you a lot of money.
I understand that most that use PPC advertising want to get visitors and conversions, but just because you put a high cost keyword in, doesn’t mean you will get what you want. In most cases, high cost keywords will bring you traffic, but rarely bring the conversions. This is a big no-no in paid search advertising. You have to justify your ad spend with conversions, so unless you have thousands to spend and are just looking for visitors, leave the high cost keywords out. How much do you think the word apple will cost you in a day? Take a look at a few of the top apple terms…..
I did this search on the basis of just $0.50 per click and no budget to show the potential of what these type of keywords would bring. Does your advertising budget have this much per day? You might ask why anyone would put these terms in their search ad groups, but I have seen companies that just sell aftermarket ipod, iphone, and ipad accessories have these terms in their account. They never could understand why they were wasting so much money and never getting any conversions. The data speaks for itself I believe. Most people that search for these broad terms are notorious for not purchasing. They are in the research stage of the buying cycle. People that search for terms that usually contain 3-5 terms have a better chance of purchasing than broad searchers do. If you don’t sell these items, then you never need to be bidding on them. You will never win and you will end up broke. Do yourself and your company a favor and take an extra 5 minutes to put all your keywords through a traffic estimator and strip out all the high cost keywords. You will be happy that you did.
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Great post again mate. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. It doesn’t have to be hard yet mose people fail to realize the basics.