Negative Keywords Playing The Positive Role

A pretty good list of relevant keywords and adcopies, that are content rich with appropriate match types, are the ones that comes on top in PPC management. But are we missing something else here? Suppose, say you are running a campaign for ecards. The keywords will be "ecards", "cards", "e cards", "free ecards" and so on. If the keywords are in broad and phrase match type and if someone is searching for invitation cards or plastic cards, there are chances that your ads may appear and probably the user might click on the ad. The result - unwanted click & unwanted spend. Imagine if users are searching for something else and not for ecards, you will be spending unnecessarily for unwanted traffic.

This is where negative keywords come to the rescue (not completely but still in a reasonable way). Negative keywords can cull the unwanted traffic by not allowing your ad to be displayed for irrelevant search. For the above mentioned example you can use negatives such as "plastic" or "invitation" to eliminate unwanted clicks. Negative keywords can be of broad, phrase or exact. Usage of match types varies depending upon the product/service you are having.

So, how do you get the proper negatives? Google has the perfect answer. In Google Adwords Report Center you will find an option called Search Query Performance Report. By generating this report, you will get the search queries that have triggered your ads. This list will show the keywords that you have bid on plus the other irrelevent terms that are similar in someway to your relevant keywords. The latter are the real culprits. Adding negatives will thus result in - relevant clicks, good number of conversions and thereby better conversion rate with lower cost per conversion.

SEO Tricks That Will Lower Your Page Ranking

Link building with a probably harmful site or which is not relevant to your content can be dangerous since that will lower your ranking. Crawlers will report these links as bad/irrelevant a they are navigating the user to a different content. Harmful sites such as those having a bad reputation or under black list will in turn affect your website's reputation.

Adding lots of irrelevant keywords will rule out your website from the SERPs.

Creating multiple sub pages can upset the search engines even though they can provide a great deal of content along with relevant keywords.

Borrowing content from other website will put you in trouble. A small percentage (say 1%) is okay but not on the main page. Stealing someone's content can end up in your site getting banned or you being sued for copyright infringement.

Yahoo! Search Marketing On Target

Yahoo! Search Marketing has been updated with three new features which are available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match.

Demographic targeting - Targetting the desired audience by age and gender. Demographic targetting based on the concept of bid adjustment with which a premium bid can be set for the categories that are worth rather than losing traffic unnecessarily.

Ad scheduling - Running campaigns according to our timings! Sounds cool eh? Well Yahoo! has brought this feature wherein we can schedule our ads to run at particular time/time zone. So that we dont have to worry about the ads being shown when there is no business especially during midnight hours.

Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting - Mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. New dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

New Search-based Keyword Tool from Google

Google has released a new keyword tool called Search-based Keyword Tool. What makes it differ from the existing Adwords tool is that it generates keywords that are not present in your current account. Isn't that an advantage of having keywords that we probably miss and may be some relevant traffic?

This is how it works - search a keyword and it gives the list of keywords not already in your account, their monthly searches, competition, sug.bid and from which webpage it is extracted. You can export these keywords as xls too.

The tool is available to US and UK users. But the drawback is the version which is Beta and Google has already stated that it wont be responsible for any issues regarding the usage of the new keywords like disapproval or violation of law.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense (much better if it was Adspace which makes more sense to those who are new to Google Adsense) is a program by Google which allows us to sell advertising space in our website to advertisers. Not any ad but ads that are relevant to our website and that too free of cost. We get money from Google when someone clicks on an ad. Sounds interesting? Well, this is something that can be done without much effort. All we need is a good website with a better page rank and an Adsense account in Google. Paste a few lines of code from Google into the HTML for our site, and let Google fill in our pages with color-coordinated ads. When a visitor clicks on an ad link, Google records the click and we get paid for it. Get ready for a monthly check from Google : )

Predictability in Campaign Management (SEM)

In everyday life people are always consumed by predictions. They predict about something which they are not sure about. It is like a ‘hit or miss’. Chances are that the predictions work and we starts believing in ourselves. Predictions can be purely based on assumptions or based on the facts from one’s own experience. In Search Engine Marketing, predictability is a pious effort. Because in order to predict about user trend, you have to step into their shoes. For example; when you are bidding on a particular keyword, it will be a foolish thing to bid with a vague mind. On contrary, if you analyze the performance of the keyword for a particular timeframe, then you can predict the future performance of that particular keyword. Not only this, prediction of outcome in every stage of SEM is important. You need to assume that you are the user trying to find something. The user trend will vary, so you set the predictions accordingly.

Google algorithm remains Ambiguous

Google Editorial & Format Guidelines adheres to non-usage of generic superlatives in ad copies. But if we search in Google, for example; "best hotels" or "cheapest travels", ads are displayed with these kind of superlatives (use of dynamic keyword insertion can result in superlatives) . Google says not to use such adtexts and Google itself displays ads related to superlatives makes it confusing. It looks like Google is discarding with one hand and retaining with the other. Not only superlatives, but also use of punctuations and symbols are seen in sponsored ads. Therefore the big question remains - is it we who are not adhering to the guidelines or is it Google? What we can do is to test by uploading ads having superlatives and punctuations and symbols and see whether Google is serving our ads. If yes then its good. If not then Google needs to restructure their algorithm.