Tuesday, 5 February 2019

Weekly Wisdom with Joel Bondorowsky: Prevent Ad Keyword Cannibalization in a Few Simple Steps

Modified Transcript

Intro

Hello to all the amazing internet marketers out there.  As you know, advertisers that have keywords which are triggered by the same search term compete with one another in what is called the Ad Auction. But you may be surprised to find that before this happens, there is an internal auction inside of your own Google ads account, where you could be essentially competing with yourself!  

That is right, different keywords in your own campaign compete with each other in an internal auction, when they match with the same search term. The winning keyword will be the one with the highest ad rank. This leads to a loss of control of the traffic that your campaign brings. An ad group with tailor-made ads for particular terms may lose its traffic to another group. And if it becomes necessary to lower bids on a particular word, the traffic that the keyword was bringing may hop to another keyword in another group.

Which is why today I am going to explain to you how to run a report to identify if and where this is happening and then explain to you what you need to do in order to fix the problem, which we will do on the ad group level.

Extracting The Data

We need to run and download a search term report for all campaigns that are targeting overlaps.  There are several ways to do this, but for today’s lesson, I will show how to do it from the reporting section in Google Ads.

  • After logging into your account, click on the reports icon.

  • Click “Custom” to create a custom report.

  • Select “Table”.

  • Next, you will want to filter the campaigns groups you would like to analyze for this report. It is important that you only choose campaigns which can compete with themselves due to similar settings, such as geography and device. To enable the filter, click the filter icon, then choose campaign from the dropdown. Next, choose the relevant campaigns and apply.

  • Now you will want to set the appropriate date range.

  • And we are ready to create the table:

    • For rows

      • Campaign

      • Ad group

      • Search keyword

      • Search term

    • For columns

      • Just impressions.

  • Next, click on the download icon.

  • Select Excel .csv.

  • The report will automatically download when ready.

  • Google gives you the option to save this report to easily create it again in the future. As well as scheduling the report.

Creating the Report

Now that the report has downloaded, go ahead and open it up in Excel.

  • First, you will want to save your report as an Excel workbook file or .XLSX

  • Next, we will need to concatenate campaign names and ad groups; this is to distinguish from ad groups in different campaigns that have the same name.

    • First, add a column before column A.

    • In the cell to the left of the “campaign name” column, concatenate column b of that row, with column c of that row, separated by a ^ symbol.

    • Next drag down the formula all the way down column A.

  • Now we will create a pivot table which is where we will run our analysis.

  • To do this, click on “insert” and choose pivot table.

  • Select the appropriate table range.

  • Place “search term” as the first row and “campaign^ad group” right under it.

  • And impressions as values.

  • Collapse rows so that only the search terms are shown.

  • Then sort impressions from largest to smallest.

  • Now you are looking at what is essentially a search term report. If you expand one of the rows, you will see which ad groups brought in the traffic.

  • Next, let’s make it easier to see which search terms are falling into more than one ad group by adding “count of ad group” to values.

There are two ways to prevent search terms falling into more than one ad group. The first is to remove the keyword that is triggering the term, but sometimes removing the word is not an option. When this happens, you will need to use negative keywords to channel traffic into the right groups.

Say, for example, you have are advertising mobile phone chargers. You built your campaign into multiple ad groups. One ad group has the keyword “phone chargers” in phrase match, and another has the keyword “android phone chargers”. Both of these keywords can match with the term, android phone charger, thus they are both competing for the same term in the internal ad auction. You can eliminate this by putting the negative word, -Android in the phone chargers group. Now the ‘phone charger’ won’t serve for any search with the word Android in it. Those words will thus get a bid for the traffic that they are designated for, as will the words in the Android group. Each group will also have more targetted ads for the traffic they are serving to.  

This concludes my Weekly Wisdom session. I hope you found it useful.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author:

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Weekly Wisdom with Joel Bondorowsky: Prevent Ad Keyword Cannibalization in a Few Simple Steps appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.



source https://news.scott.services/weekly-wisdom-with-joel-bondorowsky-prevent-ad-keyword-cannibalization-in-a-few-simple-steps/

No comments:

Post a Comment