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It is nice to hear someone speak to the other side of this - great insight! While we do find that bidding on brand names is extremely advantageous for most of our clients, we do have a small handful of clients who experience the downside that you mentioned - existing customers clicking on PPC ads to manage their accounts and such.
One thing we're testing to combat this, is having our PPC titles read "______ - Get Started Today' (company name in the blank). The hope is that the 'Get Started' aspect will deter existing customers from clicking on the PPC ad and instead they will move down to organic so that we don't waste a click.
Thanks Jill and Sandra - I agree that it would be nice to hear a bit more B2B SEM news!
Great article - we too have seen many of our clients 'matched' to some really off-the-wall variations. As a result, I've gone from a person who relied heavily on Broad/Negative Matches to a person who is now using Phrase/Negative and even Exact for some clients. Like you I'm not a cynic or Google conspiracy theorist by any means. I agree with you that they do have by far the best PPC platform out there and have made a lot of great additions to make our lives as advertisers that much easier. But Expanded Broad Match has become quite ridiculous IMO.
Thanks for getting the word out.
Very insightful article - I've passed it along internally to share with colleagues. I've always viewed PPC as a great source of info for guiding SEO efforts - but this is another useful takeaway that I hadn't thought about as much.
Story: The SEO Song - Classic
Thanks for sharing this article. This was especially interesting to me because we had the EXACT same experience with trying to change the Content Network over to a new campaign for one of our clients. I panicked for about 1-2 weeks because our traffic and conversions plummeted after the changeover, but we decided to stick it out. At about week 3 or 4 we were starting to climb back up within the new campaign.
It's taken about 2 months to FULLY recover.
After this experience I have to completely agree with your conclusion that the best course of action is to avoid moving your Content Network campaign once it is established...
Great points! I have to admit, I used to be the person who didn't even touch the content network at all for a number of years. But I eventually figured out that many of our clients can get a great ROI from the content network, by employing a lot of the strategies you mentioned here.
If i can add a number 6? Pull Google's Placement Performance reports often and use the Site Exclusion tool to eliminate unwanted traffic from non-converting content network sites.
thx for the post...
I completely agree that a huge responsibility rests on our shoulders as PPC managers to set up sound strategies in regards to Expanded (Broad), Phrase, Exact and Negative Match keywords.
However, I do think AdWords is shirking some of their responsibilities for improving 'search quality' when they start making Broad Match more and more ridiculously broad.
JstaTad's example above for the cholesterol website is classic. Here Google has the most elaborate, meticulous and accurate algorithms in the industry when it comes to their organic search results. Do you think a cholesterol website would ever show up in the organic results when someone typed in 'fat girls sex'? Most definitely not. But then again they aren't making money off of organic either.
I get that Google is a business and that they focus on revenue just like any other business. But I find their focus on 'Quality' these days conflicts greatly with what they are doing with Broad Match these days. Big contradiction...
To think, all this time I've known you I had no idea you had all this pent-up pay-per-click envy! If you'd like to take the search 'Ferrari' for a spin, I'll let you change some PPC bids ... maybe even tweak an ad description or two ;) What a power fix!
Seriously, great points throughout!
couldn't agree more... the days of hashing through log files isn't entirely over. but at least we're getting somewhere.
Thanks for sharing the insight on how to use these tools to better decipher Google's intentions. For the most part, we've fared well with the Quality Score. But we definitely have some instances where the terms and ad groups are very tight, the ad descriptions directly reflect the terms, and the landing page is highly relevant as well - but the Quality Scores don't reflect this. Very frustrating...
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Story: When do Branded Terms not Work in Your PPC Campaign?