Effective Keyword Research & List Preparation (for PPC) - Day 4

Step Six - Customizing Your List for Google & Yahoo!… And Some Really Handy Tips on Improving and Optimising Your Keyword Lists.

Now that you have the basic list, it's time to customize it for each of the search engines we want to advertise on. At this stage of our campaigning, I would suggest you only go for the two biggest engines out there - the smaller ones you can cover off later, as these are a lot more effort for a lot less return.

Google and Yahoo! together should cover about 85% of the search market in most territories. Again, I am generalizing here, so if you are in an unusual territory with an unusual product, then you may need to think in different terms. But generally, it makes sense to cover as much territory with as little effort as possible.

Customizing our list for use on Google

Some people will go ahead right now and upload the list as is, but I suggest you customize it for the specific engine your campaign will be running on.

Think of it this way - if you do you test properly you will get proper results, which will give you info to make the right decision.

So take the above list and let's see which kwds you can:

• add a plural version to
• switch the two words around to form a phrase that is still relevant and still makes sense
• you would also need to decide what type of match to run for each word. Generally, I would do all of them as exact match - just for the test run. Later on when optimizing the campaign you can think of smart variations to help you get the optimum performances.

For the brand related terms you should play around with different match types.

Customizing our list for use on Yahoo!

And now the list for Yahoo!

Yahoo are a bit more different in the way they run their kwds. Essentially they run them on canonical meanings. For example, in their DB "weight loss" may be the same as "lose weight" or "how to lose weight" and so on.

This makes it very difficult to know exactly what phrases exactly will end up in your live campaign.

So this is how I do things…

Nothing too clever really. If you have the luxury of an account manager contact, send them your original list and ask them to de-dupe it agains their DB. They will do that before you upload the words and will return the ones they are willing to accept.

If you're not blessed with an account manager yet, I'm afraid you'd have to upload all your words and then wait for them to go through the editorial approval process (now semi-automated) and then just see which ones they've accepted.

Conclusion

With that we are ready to start setting up our campaign.

It is not in the scope of this case study to take you down the path of setting up and running a PPC campaign - that you'll have to stick around for - *grin*.

In our next case study we'll go through the actual account setup and ad writing, but for now this is it - I want to give you some time to work through this one before we move on.

So for now, I want to finish off by giving you a few handy tips on how to continue evolving your kwd list. This is a bulleted list for now - just to give you the ideas.

Keep it in a safe place as we will keep referring to some of the tactics as we do our next case studies.

periodically review your kwds performance to establish which ones will be your best converters

don't hesitate to "sack" any of the under-performers or the money drainers

once you make your "control" group work profitably for you, you can start adding more phrases on to that list - remember to segment groups closely

add mine in groups rather than all at once - again with the logic that they are a lot easier to control in smaller chunks. Weed out the ones that don't work from the previous group and then add the next group - like a production line…

I sub-segment my list into best performing, slow converters, test terms, and any other group that may make sense to me. The general rule is to keep them to as few as possible, make them logical, and make sure you're not over complicating your life by using them.

To get some fresh terms - hold a brainstorming meeting with a couple of your friends and see if you can get any other phrases that are different from the ones you have but still describe the product you aim to sell.

use your web log files to see if there are any phrases you haven't thought of that people are using to find you with.

check with the vendor - often the vendor will be able to tell you what words convert best - obviously he has to have a reason to share that priceless info with you…

Hey - what do you know - we're at the end of this case study as well.

These are going soo fast now.

Thank you for all your feedback. It's helping me steer these in the direction that should help you best - keep them coming.

So if you're still here after all this, I think that's great. I want to give you the bonus I promised you.

Just as in the first case study, all you need to do is send me an email through the contact us form and include this in the Subject line: Yes, Anita please send me my CS2 bonus.

Hopefully you found this beneficial - but if you felt I should include something else let me know.

Next case study will be on how to write your ads for your kwd groups. I don't know when we will start it, but I will give you a good warning before hand.

See you then.

Anita

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