Using Strategizer for Google AdWords PPC (Pay Per Click)

Wordtracker Strategizer finds your most profitable keyword niches – the groups of keywords you get the best response rates for. Here we’ll show you how to use those keyword niches in Google AdWords PPC advertising.

With PPC and Google AdWords you bid for the keywords you want your adverts to appear for when searched with on Google. Eg, if your site sells books and newsletters about managing businesses then you might want your ad to appear for a search with business strategy.

But your bids must have a ‘match type’ which determines precisely what keywords your ads will appear for. There are three main keyword match types:

Exact match bid: With an Exact match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for the exact search business strategy and no other search.

Phrase match bid: With a Phrase match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for searches containing the words business strategy in that order, eg, business strategy development but not business management strategy.

Broad match bid: With a Broad match bid for business strategy your ad will appear for searches containing the words business plus strategy in any order, eg, business strategy development and business management strategy.

Phrase and Broad match bids are incredibly powerful because they allow a single bid to reach a keyword’s long tail, ie, all other keywords containing the bid keyword. Eg, all keywords containing business strategy. And most keywords' long tails are very very long.

Phrase and Broad match bids are powerful but they are also problematic because most keywords' long tails – and therefore most Phrase and Broad match bids – will include many keywords of no interest to you. Unchecked Phrase and Broad match bids are a great way to lose your money quickly by bidding on irrelevant keywords and paying for unwanted clicks.

But Phrase and Broad match bids can be controlled with Negative bids.

Bids for different keywords are grouped into Ad groups. Ad groups can include Negative keywords – keywords that you don’t want your ads to appear for. Eg, that businesss management website might want its advert to appear for searches containing business strategy but not business strategy jobs. This can be done by making business strategy job and business strategy jobs Negative keywords.

Choosing which keywords to bid on and what match types to use is a detailed craft that requires balancing the following:

Finding your most profitable keywords.
Making Exact match bids on those keywords.
Making lower (fewer $ per click) Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords but controlling them with Negative keywords.

Strategizer finds target keywords

Strategizer converts your Google Analytics non-paid keyword reports into keyword niche reports. This gives you a ‘broad match’ view of your site’s performance for different keywords.

So instead of getting an idea about how your site might perform on PPC for an Exact match bid for business strategy (which Google Analytics will give) you get an idea of how it might perform with a Broad match bid.

Find your site's highest responding keyword niches by sorting your Strategizer reports by your preferred response metric. The result might give you a report like the one below, showing the top 10 highest responding keyword niches for a real business management site (this report is sorted by Goal CR which aggregates response to Goals set in Google Analytics):

Strategizer highest response report

Build a bid stack (Exact, Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords)

Build a bid stack for the seed keyword of each keyword niche delivering a high response rate. A bid stack includes Exact, Phrase and Broad match bids on the same keywords.

However, the Phrase and Broad match bids must have accompanying Negative keywords. Here’s how to get them for each target keyword …

Finding Negative keywords with Strategizer

In Strategizer, filter your report to only show keyword niches containing your target keyword. Then sort results by your response metric (with the lowest values at the top). Eg, if my target keyword is management skills then I filter results like this:

In the above report management skills is the target keyword for our PPC.

The keyword niches highlighted in yellow are sub-niches of management skills and are delivering 0% response so we don’t want our ads to appear for them. Instead we’ll use them as Phrase match Negative keywords with our Phrase and Broad match bids. This will make sure our ads do not appear for any searches containing those phrases.

Note: this report has revealed an even higher responding sub-niche of management skills – business management skills (highlighted in pink above which means it's been made a target keyword niche). This should at least have its own exact match bid and be considered for its own ad group.

Negative keywords from Analytics, AdWords and the Wordtracker Keywords tool

Strategizer will find you some of your most reliable Negative keywords (you can see they aren’t converting) but don’t rely on it alone. Here are four other ways to find Negative keywords:

Google Analytics: enter your seed word into the keyword filter on the non-paid keyword report and look for keywords that don’t convert.
Wordtracker: enter your keywords into Wordtracker’s Related keywords tool and use your intuition and common sense.
AdWords tools: AdWords itself will suggest keywords that you can consider to be Negative keywords.
AdWords Google Search Query Tool: immediately your AdWords campaigns start you should look at your results on the Google Search Query Tool. If keywords are responding badly consider adding them as Negative keywords.

Determining how much work a keyword should get

Strategizer shows you Google’s estimates of the size of each of your target keyword niches. The larger a keyword niche, the more potential it offers for rewards and losses from PPC.

So the bigger a keyword niche the more effort you should put in to finding Negative keywords and further refining your ad groups with exact match bids or new ad groups for sub niches (like business management skills above is a sub niche of management skills).

Money saving tip

If it's too expensive to bid for an Exact match on your target keyword niche's keyword - that's management skills in our example above - make it an Exact match Negative keyword. That way your Phrase and Broad match bids can still compete for less expensive keywords.

Use this advice with more wide-ranging help

Successful AdWords and PPC requires a broad range of skills and as much experience as possible. Strategizer can give you a great start but you must use it and the advice here with other resources. I highly recommend Ian Howie's AdWords Masterclass book and his articles on AdWords here.

Also please note the Strategizer only works with sites that already have organic search engine traffic to learn from and a Google Anlaytics account to import data from.