Don’t Forget Keyword Management for Google Ads Success

Rachel: 00:00:11

Hey everyone, Regina here with Starter PPC, just wanted to

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hop on video and do a quick public

service announcement to tell everybody

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that keyword management is not dead.

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I think that, a lot of, people

get started with Google ads.

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they add a couple of negative keywords

in the beginning they sit back and rely

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on the, automated bidding strategies,

Maximize conversions, maximize conversion

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value, and they trust Google to go

out and do the research and collect

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data and see which keywords are

going to do well and Google claims.

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They do this, and I do think

that they try a little bit.

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I think they try their best to get you a.

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maximize the conversions or maximize

the conversion value, which is what

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you've chosen in your bidding strategy.

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But keep in mind, Google is always going

to have its own self interest at heart.

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So it's not going to do That last bit

to make sure that it's really getting

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you the Maximum, because why it loves

to collect commissions on click.

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So it loves to fill, add placements

that nobody else wants to fill, right?

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Low competition.

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If it can put yours there, then why not?

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if it loves to drive up.

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competition, right?

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So it might bid on certain keywords

that has never done well for you, but

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if it can have three people bidding

in that auction, it's just going

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to drive up to the maximum that the

highest paying bidder is going to bid.

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And then Google gets to collect a

slightly higher commission on that click.

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So there's little things like that,

where Google is always going to have

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its own finances, ahead of yours.

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keyword management as alive as ever.

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and I want to show you guys an example

of this, where we can see it in one of

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the accounts that we've been working

on since, like a year and a half now.

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just in case anyone's curious,

this is an e commerce account.

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They sell, interactive materials,

for the religious world.

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so workbooks and posters and things

like that for the world of religion.

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I don't believe it's too seasonal.

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and I do think that even though

it's an e commerce company, these

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strategies apply across the board

to industries because it's really,

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You against Google in this case.

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anyways, here you can see I have

pulled up June through October

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and I'm showing a monthly view.

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The blue line is ROAS,

which is return on ad spend.

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and keep in mind, by the way, that

the ROAS is not a true return on

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ad spend because it does rely on

Google's ability to track every

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single click through to the sale.

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and as we know It drops

so many conversions.

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So the only way to find your true return

is to use a metric called media efficiency

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ratio, which is where you zoom out and

you look at the total business revenue and

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divide it by the total business ad spend.

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So that's your true return on ad spend

is called media efficiency ratio.

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But I'm using raw as in this case, we use

it a lot internally to try to beat our,

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Month over month or week over week, right?

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So we're always looking at it as a

reference point, to see if what we're

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testing and what we're trying in the

account is making things better or worse.

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ROAS here is in blue and you

can see it was 166 in June.

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Cost is about 4, 000 and you

can see month over month.

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The ROAS just starts to dip, right?

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125 in July down to 130.

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I actually went up by 5 percent in August.

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For some reason, cost is

staying the same the whole time.

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And then in September, the rise

dips quite a bit more down to 97%.

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And, kind of raised the alarm for

us starting to see this trend.

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knowing it's not seasonal.

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we had a keyword management

strategy, but I would say it

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was a little on the light side.

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And here we decided we got to try

something new in this account.

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What we've been trying

isn't working anymore.

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And so we decided, not seeing too

many other opportunities to try really

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leaning into the keyword management.

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And we started, really fine

tuning and manipulating the.

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search terms and the keywords and the

negative keywords, very granularly

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and spending a lot of time in

there, near the end of September

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and the beginning of October.

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And you can see that even though

the cost stays the same again, the

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ROAS shoots way up from 97 to 152.

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so we're almost back up to

June, what we had in June.

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And I think that it will be

even higher here in November.

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First of all, let's just do a quick

comparison so we can see what we can see.

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And then we'll go over to the change

history, and I'll show you just how

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many search terms we changed in order

to achieve this type of results.

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So I'm going to compare

October to the previous month.

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I'm just going to look at this

total business row, total account

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row down here at the bottom.

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Here we can see the rows went up by

54%, Huge jump, month over month.

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cost stayed the same, 0.

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3 percent difference.

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the cost per click went Up you guys 25

percent and I think this is a lesson

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because we have so many clients that

are focused on the cost per click.

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It's not really the cost per click.

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That's the only metric you

want to be looking for, right?

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If the click through rate goes up enough

and the conversion rate goes up enough

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to make up for the cost per click, right?

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Because you have a higher

quality of person who's clicking.

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More motivation means a

higher click through rate.

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More motivation means more,

more purchased intent, right?

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It means a higher conversion rate.

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Wow, conversion rate went up 267%.

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So we're getting a higher

caliber of lead here.

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It's okay to spend more on that click.

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It's okay, you're cleaning up some

of the mess and sometimes, that makes

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your cost per click average go up.

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It doesn't matter.

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Doesn't matter in this case.

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so here I have the first three months.

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So June, July and August,

where we saw that downward, the

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beginning of the downwards trend.

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And you can see that the amount of

keyword changes we made in the, in these

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three months is 255 keyword changes.

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All right.

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So we were monitoring it, we

were making some changes and

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this was working in the past.

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the account was growing, but when

the account started shrinking, we

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thought we have to test something,

and our other tests weren't working.

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So what did we do starting in September?

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Hi there.

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Quick interruption.

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A lot of businesses, especially

those that are just starting

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out, have limited budgets.

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And so because of this, they're turned

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agencies have minimum budget thresholds

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So what happens is the business owners

end up learning Google ads themselves.

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And the problem with that is

that most of the advice online is

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geared towards larger accounts.

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And the advice doesn't have any of those

strategies or tricks that can kickstart

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the algorithm into giving a small

account a leg up over larger competitors.

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So it often just doesn't work.

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And the business just ends up

losing money month over month.

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Okay.

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Back to the video.

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Let's do, September through mid

October, because I want to show you

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what we did that made October shoot up.

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So just across a month and a half,

we did 1, 300 keyword changes here.

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And that's really what

impacted the performance.

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300, keyword changes resulted in

Those higher performance that we

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were looking at on the other tab.

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you can see the row is already starting

to go up where in October, right?

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I only have the first two

weeks in October, but it's

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already going up to 146%.

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And we know that by the end of

October, it was, averaging one.

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I say?

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155.

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I think it was.

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there's so many rows.

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most of them are.

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negative keyword lists, a lot of this,

was gained by digging through the data.

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I did, another video on this,

just showing kind of the process

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to clean up search terms.

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I'm not sure there's a super

straightforward step by step

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process that we go through.

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It's really a matter of, Looking at

the data from a few different angles,

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Sort by click through rate, sort

by conversion rate, sort by cost.

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look at a three month view,

look at an all time view.

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and get a sense of which keywords

are working and which aren't.

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And as you go, if you identify,

this one spent a bunch of money

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with nothing to show for it.

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Check the box, add to

the negative keywords.

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you can choose to add that keyword to just

the campaign, or you can choose to add

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it to the account level negative keywords

list over in the tools and settings.

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There's really no right

or wrong way to do it.

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It just depends on whether

the keyword that you're adding

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to the negative is right.

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going to be relevant to other

campaigns or if it's not going to

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be relevant to the entire business.

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there's really no rhyme or reason to it.

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It's every decision has to be made.

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With a custom approach and using

logic as you're going through,

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negative list, 26 keywords at it.

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I'm sure somewhere we went and found

just like general negative keyword lists.

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none of these are all custom

keyword lists based on performance.

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But when we first begin a new campaign,

we have, some, just global negative

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keyword lists, which you can find online.

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And, that's a good place to

start, but it's really not enough.

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Once you have many months of data

under your belt, which we finally

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did with this account, it's time to

really lean into keyword management.

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All right.

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that's all for today.

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Thank you so much for watching.

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Good luck with your keyword management.