A Powerful Technique for Supercharging AdWords Results

Posted by Richard Stokes on March 9, 2006 to

After the "coverage" concept gels in our clients' heads, the next thing they ask us is how they can use the data that we provide them to increase the number of impressions that their ads are getting. We then proceed to teach them the full methodology for maximizing their PPC traffic. The following is just one of the techniques that make up the entire system.

Here we see the starting coverage for AdGooroo in the "Search Intelligence" category. As you can see, it's quite good for a campaign that is just starting out. This is entirely due to keyword selection. The truth of the matter is, most advertisers choose a very limited number of keywords. This is where we have the advantage - using our keyword generation tools, we were able to produce hundreds of keywords that our collective competition is targeting. Simply entering those into AdWords and bidding $.20 for each gave us the highest coverage in the industry:

However, we would really like to get our coverage much higher - around 100% if possible. After all, if your ads don't appear, than nobody can click on them.

We achieve this by figuring out which keywords we aren't appearing in. Virtually every campaign has keywords which are not appearing on the first page of results. The trick is to get them to position 7 on the first page, the cheapest position that will get exposure to most of the market (85% of searchers only look at the first page of results).

Why position 7 and not 8? Because at position 8, half of your ads will spill over on to the second page of results. You lose half of the available impressions.

So the next task is to find out which keywords we are not positioned on the first page for. Very easy to do - load up your "Advertiser Detail Report" and click on the third tab, "Show missing keywords". Every keyword which appears with an X was not seen on the first page of results:

Next, log into AdWords for each of these keywords and see why the keyword isn't appearing. There can be a number of reasons. The #1 reason is that a low bid is placing the keyword on the 2nd, 3rd, or even deeper search results pages. Just raise them steadily over the next few days untli they reach position 7.

In the above example, you can see that this keyword is showing up at position 17. That places it at the top of the 3rd page, where only 2 people have seen it in the previous week.

To complete this step, repeat this step for every keyword on the list. It usually takes only a few days to see a significant increase in coverage.

If you're an astute AdWords expert, you may at this point realized that following this step alone will undoubtedly generate more traffic, but at a higher daily spend and avg CPC. This is quite true, and there are other steps in the AdGooroo system that address this. The combined results of following all of our techniques can be staggering - for just one example, see the AdGooroo case study compiled by SageRock Consulting, in which they increased traffic from 1,378 clicks/month to a staggering 59.938 clicks/month, all while dropping CPC from $3.50 to $.24.