AdWords, SEO & Google Lies
Many of our AdWords clients come to us with an existing account that is burning through their budget far too quickly.
While there’s a multitude of ways to bring down your AdWords Cost-Per-Click that could warrant it’s own video, there’s a few easier ways to dip your toes into the deep waters of keyword research to improve your targeting and stop paying for ads that don’t work. In our example in the video above, we took a look at keywords related to our pages that rank for a host of Gasp-related searches. After our first post began ranking well for the search term ‘Gasp Fail’, we started looking into related searches that would provide higher impressions and clicks for a follow up story.
Google Insights keyword research
Using Google Insights first we ran a quick search for Gasp in Australia for the past 90 days that revealed ‘Gasp Clothing’ to be a far more popular search term than both ‘Gasp Fail’ and ‘Gasp Melbourne’. Google Insights has a history of unreliability and tends to avoid presenting solid data on search terms, but is incredibly useful to get started and discover search trends and relationships.
Google Webmaster Tools keyword research
Next we took a look at the same data in Google Webmaster Tools and found different results. Because of our original post that ranked high for Gasp Fail, we had access to a host of different search data we wouldn’t be privy to otherwise. Webmaster Tools told a completely different story to Insights however, showing that the search terms were perhaps closer in impressions than we previously thought. Someone isn’t telling the truth.
AdWords Keyword Tool keyword research
Google Webmaster tools will show us data based on where we rank for the terms however, so we took to the Google AdWords Keywords Tool to check the three search terms again. AdWords displays data as Global Monthly Searches, a different metric that can be a bit deceptive. Naturally we got different and again inconsistent results from the AdWords Keywords Tool which showed ‘Gasp Clothing’ having over 9,000 global monthly searches against ‘Gasp Fail’s 50 odd searches. That simply can’t be true.
Using Google’s tools together
While we got different results from each keyword analysis tool, we were consistently seeing ‘Gasp Clothing’ come out on top. If your keywords look good to Google’s tools, they more than likely look good to Google. By checking our data was solid and cross-referencing our findings using a host of Google’s keyword tools, we’re able to find keywords to target ads more effectively, leading to lower costs for more specific and targeted ads.
If you’re paying for clicks, make sure you’re doing it right and using all the tools Google provides to lower your AdWords budget without diminishing its impact.
Watch the video above to discover other ways to lower your AdWords spend!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
