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Thursday, October 18, 2007
Every week, I read another warning from search marketers about various algorithm changes in the engines. Although these changes can have very little impact on some of our PPC campaigns, they can cause more pain in others.
Google's expanded broad match has been a big topic for a while now. Among all the algorithm changes search marketers have to deal with, issues with expanded broad matching seem to have caused the most problems, and often some of the most challenging.
Earlier this year, one of my campaigns suddenly started to decline in efficiency, as early as the end of January/early Feb (without making any drastic changes to the account). After digging into some data, I noticed that the majority of the decline was coming from rising CPC's in Adwords. When looking into it further with Google, I learned they rolled out a more "robust" expanded broad match at that time and knew right away this was effecting my ads. Sure enough, although I had very targeted creative in my campaign, certain keywords were triggering ads that did not match up with some of the specific search queries users were typing in (many of which weren't even in my keyword list).
Google's recommendation was to change all of my broad match types to either exact or phrase and add more negatives to the account. At first I was skeptical (and a bit freaked out), as I was concerned my traffic volume would significantly decrease. However, after changing match types and conducting a couple rounds of keyword research to capture all the important variations - the campaign was performing better than ever. After a couple of months, volume picked right back up to where it was before the change, with larger returns. Nowadays, I'm more aware of assessing the vertical, as well as keyword variations that "could" trigger my ads, when considering launching terms on broad match.
Another challenge - the recent algorithm change for achieving top positions above Google search results, which rolled out in August. With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, Google will now consider your maximum CPC bid (which you control) for achieving top placement - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72975. Before this change rolled out, I didn't expect this to effect our campaigns much. However (sigh), at the beginning of August, one of our accounts experienced some ups and downs, predominantly due to increased CPC's on a handful of our most competitive terms. Sure enough, these terms were victims of the new change; we quickly put forth a new bidding strategy for these terms in an effort to combat the issue, and the campaign is performing efficiently again.
These are just a couple of the algorithm challenges search marketers have to constantly keep up with on a day to day basis. Although these changes can be challenging and more often frustrating, it keeps us on our toes... and keeps our jobs interesting!Labels: campaign management, expanded broad match, google, PPC
# posted by rockcoastmedia @ 10:59 AM
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