adCenter Keyword Expansion PPC Best Practices Checklist

Today's post covers tips for creating and optimizing keyword lists.

• Choose keywords that closely match the product or service you are advertising.
• Include common term variations in your keyword list. If your keyword has common variations (Life Insurance, Term Insurance) or spelling (web site, website), add all of those variations to your keyword list. For example, if your ad sells dog houses, you should specify all possible spelling variations as keywords (dog house, doghouse, dog houses, and doghouses). Avoid wasting time on creating common variations of keywords (such as adding articles ["the," "a"] or punctuation ["'," "!"] to a keyword) as they will simply count as duplicates in your list. Microsoft adCenter will remove them automatically for you, and your bid will apply to each variation.
   

What is not normalized?

Other best practices include adding:

• Tail terms: e.g. for Travel – Affordable Packages to, Last Minute Book, Family vacation to. Use adjective/descriptors that either precede or follow the keywords.
• Misspellings: Get suggestions from Keyword research tools or adlab.microsoft.com
• Brand Name: Add your brand name before or after your existing keywords.
• Seasonal or Holiday terms: Spring discounts on, Fall sale on
• Geo State terms: Add city / state names as prefix or suffix to your existing keyword list
• Retail terms – Buy, Compare, Cheap, Discount, Find. Get more keyword expansion ideas from adlab.microsoft.com or Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (formerly adCenter Add-in for Excel Beta)

Other Tips 

• Use keywords in your ad title, display URL or destination URL: Users who see ads with text that matched their search queries are more likely to click those ads. Also try Dynamic text insertions to insert keywords into ad title, description or URL.
• Use match type to define how closely the customer’s search query matched your keyword: if your intention is to get maximum coverage, use all match types. If you are targeting a specific audience, use phrase or exact match. By selecting the match type, you specify how closely a user’s search query must match your keyword before your ad is displayed. Consider bidding separately for all match types, this will allow you to adjust bids independently based on the performance of the keyword.
• Use negative keywords to prevent your ad from appearing in unrelated searches: Negative keywords are search words or phrases that help prevent your ad from being displayed. While creating a keyword list for negative match, do not waste time creating variations/permutations except spaces and plurals since adCenter uses broad match for negative keywords.

The easiest way to expand on an existing keyword list is by adding tail terms. However some marketers go to the extreme and create really long keyword strings. Ideal length is 25-28 characters, as the CTR starts dropping significantly after 25 characters. Here’s a few more reasons why:

• If you have targeted keyword list, ad groups are more manageable
• You can get more accurate reporting on CTR
• Dynamic keyword insertions are more effective since it is the keyword that is being inserted in ad title, essentially attracting customers to visit your site.
• Loading more efficient words would increase CTR and consequently lower CPC, and will have an overall positive impact on your quality.

If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.

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12/03/2009: updated Help links