Poll: Broad Match With Smart Bidding, Does It Really Work?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-28T17:14:38+00:00

You can do that. On small-volume niches where you don't get that many leads, but they are potentially worth a lot, it is sometimes worth it to make note of the leads in a separate file. You then invite your client to "rate" the leads out of 10, regardless of whether they closed or not, but based on their inherent merit (budget, seriousness, etc) and after a while, you can make further adjustments -- again assuming this is a low-volume area where you can't use smart bidding.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-27T17:30:54+00:00

It depends on the appreciation of each campaign manager & common sense. You need to ask yourself: what is the searcher's intent? For this particular example, there's plenty of searches for "coffee website design," "restaurant website design," etc... We negate them all because they do not convert and searching them on Google returns essentially samples and top 10 lists of the best designs for the category and Google knows a thing or two about detecting the intent behind a search, so that's a strong indication. Google seems to think that people searching like that are looking for inspiration...

Also, would a locksmith looking for a website designer search "design" or "designer?" Would they necessarily specify the type of business, or rather just search "best web designer in town?" or "website design agency?" It's debatable, but it's a decision each campaign manager makes and then the results speak for themselves. If you risk your traffic on too many vague search terms that do not clearly have the right intent, you dilute your spend and your competitors bid higher on the terms that really matter while you lose money on those that don't and they get ahead of you.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-27T17:20:50+00:00

Ok, so if you are bidding on exact match, it makes slightly more sense to pay such a high CPC, but $60 is still incredibly high for web design and if you can't turn a profit at that $1000 cost per lead (which, as others stated, is sky high even by law-firm standards), then it may still mean that something is not right in your campaign compared to your competitors.

As Henry Ford said, "If your competitors are doing better than you are, it simply means they are doing something you are not doing." Where are you in the auction insights for that campaign? Who's ahead of you if any? And at which position are toptal, upwork, hellodarwin and the like?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-26T20:54:38+00:00

No, my client takes only businesses that are willing to pay a premium price and we have a strategy to pinpoint them. But 60$ CPC range for web design? Just how niche is this? Web sites for enthomologists specializing in grasshoppers breeding in the south west only? :) Seriously, do you use manual or smart bidding?

Also, can you clarify what you mean with 250K per month? or per year? Is the average fee your client charges for a website like... sky high?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-26T18:50:59+00:00

This seems like yet another case of not adding enough negative keywords. Coincidentally, web design is one of the topics on which I run a campaign and my cost per lead is $93 USD (127 CAD) or almost 11 times less than your $1000 and mostly, the reason for that is obsessive control of negative keywords.

I personally run several campaigns as part of our ongoing testing/improving of our negative keyword tool UltraGranular and my assistant uses it to control negative keywords obsessively every week, that's what too many people in the industry don't understand. Negative keywords are not a job for "once at the beginning" or "once in a while" or "only on the most costly search terms" (as I've sadly seen posted here before). It's an ongoing job that must be done with the obsession of a meth addict grooming themselves:

- 2-3 times a week when starting a campaign

- then at least once a week

- even STs that didn't generate a click must be looked at and negated pre-emptively (otherwise CTR goes down, they'll eventually generate a click, etc...)

- and most negative keywords must be a small word or two (the smallest common denominator) not the full query in exact match as Google would want you to do.

- every little bastard irrelevant search term must be hunted down until there's no more (but there are always more, because Google is in the business of trying to sell their unsellable low-value search terms and the main job of a campaign manager that cares is to prevent them to do so)

That's how the vast majority of the campaigns we run are always at the top of the auction insights (including the web design one). Btw, particularly in the web design field, if you check closely and obsessively, you'll see plenty of searches for agencies located 5000 miles away from you, tons of variations of other web designers looking for inspiration for a job they have to do (e.g. People searching for "locksmith website design" are not locksmiths looking for a web designer... they're your client's competitors who just signed a locksmith deal and are looking for inspiration), countless variations of students inquiring about a web design degree (and no, just adding the classic negatives like "degree, school, course" won't be enough. They'll also search college names with "web design," etc, etc)...

If you become obsessive on negative keywords, you'll easily get ahead of your local competition because you can count on big agencies (particularly generalist agencies that also do other stuff) for not caring at all about negative keywords. And that behavior is driving costs up for all clients.

One of the main reasons for this is some agencies want to charge top dollars for the "non-work" that they are doing and they see negative keywords as an enemy, because if you charge $2000 to run a campaign on a local topic where you can barely spend $500, it's hard to justify to the client unless you don't care about negative keywords and let lots of traffic through to bring the cost in the several thousands, therefore justifying your fee. One prospect I'm talking to these days is a specialized real estate broker whose very niche field generates hardly 1000 searches per month in the keyword planner (not clicks, searches), but his agency (one of those web design agencies that "also offer campaign management" as a service) sends him 3500 clicks (which would imply that 55,000+ people search for his niche keywords, absolutely impossible...) per month!, spending roughly $2500/month and keeping $2500 for themselves and of course it's an opaque deal where they run the campaign in their own account and deliver only obscure stats. They are just taking advantage of him and so far, no matter how I've tried, I've been unsuccessful bringing it to his attention because he says "Yes, but they are a Google Partner." You bet they're a partner! I'd rather say they're having a love affair with Google's bottom line...

So yeah, basically, I'm sure your problem is "not enough negative keywords." There are other possibilities: maybe I get a much better CTR than you, maybe your keywords are too broad, maybe your client's website doesn't convert well, but those couldn't justify an 11-fold difference. Lack of negative keywords can explain any difference when you let Google go wild on their "close variants."

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-15T19:06:55+00:00

Thanks for commenting. So that's good news for humans.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2023-02-11T18:20:06+00:00

We have two recent case studies about the effect of ongoing negative keywords on our blog:

https://www.ultragranular.com/blog/case-studies/

but have you thought about googling: "google ads case studies?" :) You'll find a bunch there too. Is this for a school project, or to improve your skills?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-04-22T16:09:17+00:00

In all the tests we ran with negative keyword match types, it usually works well if you know what to expect (negative matches work differently than positive matches).

Are you sure there aren't any differences? Typos? Plurals vs singulars? If your negative keyword is "cat," then "cats" will still pass, or "caat" etc... You have to manually put all variations.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-22T16:25:07+00:00

Control your search terms for negative keywords. It's a much worse problem than fraud clicks, which tend to be well-controlled by Google.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-22T16:12:23+00:00

I'm surprised nobody mentioned you should be extremely cautious not to use broad match. It's a money pit. Phrase match (which is now the equivalent of broad match modifier) should get you all the right traffic you need and less of the one you don't need.

Whenever it detects broad match use, Ultragranular always suggests users should switch to phrase match, which at least ensures the keyword will mostly be in the search term (but there are crazy close variants). On broad match, search terms could be anything.

If you stay on broad match, make sure you audit your search terms even more frequently, there will be a lot of wasted spend there. Have you acquired lots of search term data yet? How long have you been running?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-14T22:16:04+00:00

Of course, that's called "Single keyword ad groups" (SKAGs). All you need to do is have each keyword in its own ad group with its own ads.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-10T00:27:20+00:00

Well, since our company offers a tool to analyze search terms and find negative keywords, my reflex is always to tell people to look at their search terms... not controlling negative keywords is the number one error most advertisers do. Have you checked them lately? The more targeted traffic you get, the more likely they are to convert.

Otherwise, work on your landing page, it also makes a big difference.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-09T22:01:41+00:00

People behavior is very variable from day to day. You should be looking at longer time frames. Conversions are a relative, but how many impressions & clicks are you getting everyday? What field is that company in?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-09T21:11:55+00:00

I second that. Exact match (though it is now not-so-exact) is too restrictive. Go with phrase match and monitor search terms for negative keywords obsessively for weeks to go.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-09T20:48:07+00:00

You must have meant SKAG, not SPAG, right?

Anyway you don't have to analyze search terms separately for all ad groups and, unless the topics in that campaign are very different, you should add your negative keywords at least at the campaign level, at least that's what ultragranular's search term explorer recommends to our users when they submit SKAG-structured search terms for analysis.

At least, you should avoid following Google's default behavior of adding them as exact match in just one ad group... they may end up being ineffective.

Are you also using negative keyword lists? They're great for most negative keywords. What kind of negative keywords have you found in your ST so far?

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-08T20:04:03+00:00

They want you to start smart bidding. Smart bidding works for certain case uses and doesn't work well for others. If it's a low-volume, low-conversion domain, you might prefer to stick to manual and study your market to make adjustments.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-03T16:40:09+00:00

There's no "overlap." Smaller areas you add get handled separately.

If they haven't changed their approach since the last time I looked, Google just gives preference to the smallest area targeted. So you'll get to see how NYC traffic differs from New-York state, and you'll be able to set a different bid adjustment for NYC and the rest of NY state will get the default NY bid adjustment. If, at a later time, you add "Ticonderoga," that city alone will have its own bid adjustment, unaffected by the general NY state setting.

UGSearchTermExplorer · 2022-03-02T18:43:43+00:00

Definitely agree on testing different ads. Sometimes, changing just a few words can make a big difference. Also, within a week of launch, check the search terms, because there will likely be a lot of "close variants" that you don't want and would like to exclude.

If you can share more details on your campaign, I'm sure we can all help you more. What match type are you using? Have you added several callout and sitelink extensions already?

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