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Google Ads – Some Advice + Matching
Hi everyone
I am an ammateur PPC manager for our company. Over the years our CPA has gone up x3 and sometimes more. I have always had Google Ads managers but if they ever get back to me at all most are not helpful to say the least. They have always pushed me to try and use broad match which I have always been against due to working in a relatively niche yet competitive market with some ambigous terms that produce irrelevant traffic that costs a lot.
Now I have delved into the account and I find that a lot of the exact matches are pretty much being treated in the same way I used to expect broad match to work. When I check our lost IS to rank often it is in the 70-80% which I guess is really bad. However all my ad copy is rated good or excellent.
I am guessing that these looser matching terms are puilling down my qualiity score and making CTR and Landing page experience below average. I do have some keywords with Landing page experience above average so I assume my site is deemed ok.
I cannot understand how it is possible to have both a broad match (which seems Google are pushing for), or even exact match acting as broad (even with loads of negatives) and also maintain good QS. So what I am I meant to do? My account managers cannot even answer this question.
I have run this account for 14+ years. I keep a record of what keywords have converted to real offline sales so I know what works. This is assuming the keywords I collected are true and not these loose broad exact terms.
At the moment I am negativing all non converting “close variants” to try and maintain a more true exact match campaign but I don’t know if this is for the best or not.
Can anyone offer any advice on where I should begin to get things back on track?
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1 Reply
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Stop stressing over QS. Just focus on the best performing keywords, make sure they have enough budget, and that they are not cannibalizing each other’s traffic through a poorly-structured account. You may have to test other bid strategies also as these directly impact the performance.
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You can try this:
Create a new search campaign with your list of some working keywords
Put them all in Exact Match
Add all the negative terms you have collected so far to this campaign
Now choose Manual CPC as Bid Strategy
Now make use of the Keyword Planner to look for the Top of page Bid Range for those keywords
For example: If the top of page low – high bid range is between $2 – $8, set the bid for your keywords as $3 to ensure top of the page impression share.
Do this for all your keywords and see how it works.
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Has your campaign and ad accounts structure changed over the last 2 – 3 years to reflect Google’s changing philosophy on match type, close variant match and now making [RSA the default](https://www.takesomerisk.com/google-search-campaign-structures/).
I would leverage the search term report and search intent behind keywords to make sure my ad account makes sense in the current world. 14 years is a long time to be running any ad account and making sure it keeps up with changes in paid search is key.
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How much are spending each month and how many conversions are you getting? What is your conversion type sale, lead, call?
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The grades Google assigns to copy, keywords have never been helpful or even indicate if the keywords have a high probability to convert.
A few things you can do
* Aggressively add negative keywords
* Go with automated bidding but with tCPA or tROAS than just Max conversions
* Separate your best keywords into a separate campaign so you can bid higher and set bigger targets -
I do audits for businesses and accounts just like yours if you’re interested. I can’t say where to get back on track without taking a look at the account.
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Just as a FYI: Lost to rank -> Rank = Quality of AdCopy , Landingpage and bid.
Could just be that you lose Impressions because of low bids.
What is you bidding strategy and what are your Impression Shares on these keywords?
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I have a bit of a different perspective. You said that matching is the problem; can you share some data that outlines this (please use volume not %s). Based on limited knowledge, I’d like to know what data you’re looking at.
My theory is, it’s probably not matching. If you are getting close variance it’s likely not a large enough volume to bring down your CPA. But, that’s your data to decide. My gut tells me no.
You’re going to get a lot of responses about Exact and using negative, but I think this is the way it’s been done for a long time, but also part of the problem. Again, I’m making assumptions here, but look at where your CPC has gone up (weighted by volume). Is it the obvious exact match unicorn keyword that has driven success for you in the last xx years? (would love to know this). Over the years it’s been reliable, but hey everyone knows it’s high quality converter so everyone in the space doubles down on it.
If that’s not the case. I’m wrong and you can take the advice of others on this thread.
If you say to yourself “yeah my best converting keywords CPCs are going up!” Then consider how you might find new ways to connect dots in the customer journey. That’s where broad match is likely getting pushed on you, but not explained completely. I’ll caveat this with Smart Bidding + Broad Match because the contextual signals it now uses doesn’t work unless you use a conversion-based bidding method.
I’ll round this out with an anecdote and let you decided whether this makes sense or if I’m full of BM BS: I worked with an jewelry company that wanted to sell engagement rings. High price and pretty obvious keyword strategy: Get all the “engagement ring” keywords you can. We’ll over time more people enter the auction and engagement rings gets super competitive because we are laying the same cut paste strategy everyone has been employing for 8 or so years. Using Smart Bidding and Broad Match we were getting matches to things like “tongsten” – WTF never in a million years would I bet on a precious metal. But you know what, Broad match is considering what websites you have gone to and what keywords you’ve been researching and starts connecting some dots. I call this the “messy middle”. In isolation; the matching makes no sense and the keyword doesn’t work. Put together, we understand first time ring shoppers had no idea what that metal was or why it’s so expensive. Turns out this is a research signal that leads to a high end purchase of engagement rings. The kicker here is that it’s gotta convert – so make sure those actions are truly important. If it doesn’t convert enough, it won’t match and won’t bid to it.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this – I see this question a lot and wanted to offer a counterpoint to a lot of the strategies being suggested.
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