December 29, 2008
Blog Entry

SherpaBlog: Is Broad-Match Undercutting Your Holiday PPC Ads?

RSS   Free Newsletters  
SUMMARY: No summary available.
By Sean Donahue, Sr. Reporter

Some search marketers have been complaining for a while that Google’s expanded broad-match program is sometimes *too* broad. They’re seeing ads matched to irrelevant terms, which drives up costs without boosting conversions.

But if you’re currently running special holiday-themed PPC ad groups, it’s particularly important to see whether broad-match miscues might be affecting your traffic.

I just spoke with a paid search manager at an SEM agency who was experiencing broad-match headaches with one of his client's holiday-themed ads. The team had created a new ad group with special copy for keywords related to Christmas fruit baskets. But they noticed that, thanks to broad-match, Google was matching their regular fruit basket ads to the Christmas-related keywords.

So much for serving up that relevant holiday ad copy.

The team went into their AdWords account and added Christmas-related terms to the negative keyword list of their non-holiday themed ad groups. So, check your Search Query reports carefully to see if there are terms that might be undercutting the targeting you planned for holiday-themed ad groups. You can use negative match and optimize for the last few shopping days before Christmas.


Improve Your Marketing

Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.

Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions:

Note: Already a subscriber? Want to add a subscription?
Click Here to Manage Subscriptions