Chapter 9 : Creating Effective Ad Groups part 3

Adding and editing keywords
Most advertisers adjust keywords more frequently than they adjust ads. This
phenomenon is partly due to most advertisers using more keywords than ads.
(In other words, common practice is to associate one ad with many keywords.)
Advertisers and their marketing agents spend alarming amounts of time brainstorming
and researching keywords, so they naturally spend more time tweaking
keywords than tweaking ads.
Then there’s the fact that when Google slows or disables keywords, ads are
slowed or disabled on search pages for those faltering keywords. The natural
impulse, rightly or wrongly, is to correct the keyword. (It’s the right impulse
most of the time.)
Finally, the overwhelming emphasis on keywords throughout the SEM (search
engine marketing) universe leads to the popular belief that successful keyword
selection is the key to AdWords success.
True enough, creating successful keywords is crucial. Without a keyword, an
ad can’t run. And without a relevant keyword, the ad won’t run for long. Campaigns
of any respectable duration endure many ups and downs with their
keywords. I don’t believe there’s an AdWords advertiser on the planet who
hasn’t had a keyword disabled or a campaign slowed. And even if Google
doesn’t lower the boom, ROI considerations force resourceful advertisers to
continually refine their keyword selections.
Almost certainly, you will need to modify your keywords at some point (and
probably often). The following steps walk you through the mechanical part of
editing and adding keywords. I get into strategic considerations later.
1. In the Control Center, click the Campaign Management tab.
2. In the Campaign Name column, click the campaign containing the keywords
you want to edit.
You can’t edit shared keywords across campaigns.
3. Click the Ad Group containing the keywords you want to edit.
You can’t edit shared keywords across Ad Groups in a campaign. However,
you can make one specific campaign-wide keyword edit: adding negative
keywords that apply to every Ad Group in the campaign. Negative keywords
represent one of four keyword-matching options that I describe
later in the chapter. For now, assume that adding negative matching is not
the kind of keyword edit you’re after.
164 Part II: Creating and Managing an AdWords Campaign
4. Click the Edit Keywords link.
Note the Add Keywords link right next to it. The two resulting screens —
one for editing keywords, the other for adding keywords — are nearly
identical.
The Edit Keywords page (see Figure 9-3) includes a box showing your
CPC bid, giving you the chance to adjust it as you edit your keywords.
Furthermore, on that screen, nothing stops you from adding keywords
while you’re editing existing keywords. So there’s never any reason to
use the Add Keywords link.
5. Edit your keywords, add new keywords, and adjust your CPC bid, as
necessary.
6. Click the Estimate Traffic button for further adjustments of your bid,
or click the Save button to finish.
See Chapter 7 for a guide to using the Traffic Estimator.