It’s Monday morning here in beautiful Oklahoma. And I hope it’s a beautiful morning wherever you are too.
Mondays are a great time to reflect on your AdWords campaigns and determine if they’re going in the right direction and getting you the kind of traffic you want.
On Mondays, I’m always combing through the search terms reports for my client accounts and looking at what searches my clients’ campaigns showed up on in the last week. Combing through search terms reports is how I spend most of my Mondays.
I see a lot of AdWords campaigns and talk to a lot of advertisers, and the number one problem people have with AdWords is not understanding and/or not having a proper respect for search terms.
Keywords are what you target, and search terms are what you get.
Search terms are what searches your ads show up on. They’re what people actually type into Google when they see your ad.
As much as Chris and I hammer this point home on the Paid Search Podcast, I still see many people not focusing enough on search terms.
I run into people all the time who talk obsessively about ad copy and ad extensions. That stuff matters. But people over-emphasize it because those are the things you see outside of the AdWords account on Google searches.
People see another advertiser has the 5 star review extension showing in his ad and think to themselves if only I had the stars showing in my ad… then I’d dominate the search results and get 10 times more leads!!!
But this over-emphasis on things you can see on the search results in Google is misguided.
The real key to AdWords, the magic, is in the search terms.
Last week I audited an AdWords account for an upscale, boutique European hotel company. The search terms they were showing up on were horrible.
There was hardly anything great like luxury hotels in Milan or unique hotels in Paris. Instead, most of the searches they were showing up on were complete garbage, like hotel sex and hotels in New York (even though they don’t have any hotels in New York).
Do you think they would get more bookings from their AdWords campaign if their ads had a 5 star rating in them or if they used flashier ad copy? Of course not! If they still showed up on searches like hotel sex, it wouldn’t matter if their ad have a 5 star review extension showing in it or not, someone searching hotel sex is not going to book a room at a European hotel!
You have to show up on the right search terms. The only way this advertiser is going to get people booking rooms from their AdWords campaign is if they show up on the right search terms, like luxury hotels in Paris.
Showing up on the right search terms and putting most of your focus on search terms management is not everything, but it’s almost everything. It’s incredibly important, but still I see many people not prioritizing their search terms work. Don’t be one of these people. Respect your search terms and focus greatly on them.
Want conversions? Focus on search terms and the conversions will follow.
Here’s more on search terms…
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472708
