My Negative Exact Match
Just because this post is about something cool I figured out in Google AdWords doesn’t mean that it’s not about analytics and conversion. (Well, ok, it’s not mostly about analytics and conversion….)
I’m probably not the first person to figure this out, but I definitely stumped “my” Google Ad rep. Here was the issue and the answer, and I will pretend that my company is the customer so that I can use examples.
Issue: If I use a big single head word like analytics and I let Google AdWords use a broad match configuration, the term pulls really well when the searcher uses at least one other word with it. So, for example, if the visitor types in web analytics or analytics consulting or Pittsburgh analytics, the click through and conversion is excellent. You might be thinking, what about when they type in stock analytics or financial analytics? Those don’t matter because I already told Google never to match when the searcher uses stock or financial. You know, negative match.
The problem is, the term doesn’t do very well when someone just types in analytics – it can mean too many things. I could try to find all the phrase matches possible, but I am too lazy for that.
Answer: “So,” I said to the Google AdWords guy, “Can’t I do negative exact match? Like this: -[analytics]. That way, analytics is still a broad match term, just not when it appears alone.”
He looked at me, and he looked at my paper, and he looked at me again. “Well, I guess it should work, theoretically.”
With that I thought, this is ridiculous, I am just going to try it. So I stood there while we talked and added it and AdWords took it. Later I went back and verified that it worked, and that the click throughs and conversions were increasing. I only have a couple days of data right now, but am at a click through rate of 6% for that campaign with no decrease in conversion rate. So I am getting ready to lower the bids.
I learned that I needed the exact negative match by implementing this Google Analytics hack from GA-Experts.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
