Creating a new AdWords campaign is kind of like working on a car engine. You put in a bunch of time and effort on creating something that will work, but you’re never really certain that it’ll work as planned until you fire it up and start running the new campaign. You hope it’ll work, you’re pretty confident it’ll work, but you’re never 100% certain until you see it start working. So whenever we launch a new Rothman PPC AdWords campaign it’s kind of like working on a car engine all week and then putting the key in the ignition and turning over the engine. It’s the moment of truth.
Often times we nail it, and things work out exactly as planned. We turn on our new campaign, and with just a few tweaks we’re able to start generating quality traffic day after day, and our clients get new customers, clients, and patients and everything is good.
But sometimes the engine doesn’t start. Sometimes we turn on the new campaign and things don’t go as planned. One problem we run into from time to time is a low traffic volume issue. You do all your homework, you prepare, you build out a great campaign, and then you turn it on, and it’s crickets. You don’t get anywhere close to the traffic volume you were expecting.
There are a few strategies we try out when we run into a low volume issue, and most of them are beyond the scope of this article. But one go-to strategy for solving low traffic volume issues is to try out broad match keywords.
Generally we don’t use broad match keywords when we don’t have to. We like to focus on exact and phrase match keywords, as those match types help us maintain high traffic quality. But whenever you’re running into low volume issues, broad match keywords can save the day.
Broad match keywords are great because they allow you to show up on many more searches than exact and phrase match keywords do. But at the same time, this openness can cause severe traffic quality issues. However, there are a couple of tips I can share that will help keep the traffic quality of broad match keywords higher than it would be otherwise.
The first broad match keyword tip for keeping traffic quality strong is to use long keyword phrases. You want to use keyword phrase that are at least three or more words long. The longer your keyword phrase is, the more information Google has to work with when trying to understand what types of searches you want to show up on. So if you’re an Omaha moving company, instead of targeting moving companies as a broad match keyword, you’d want to target longer broad match keyword phrases like office moving companies in Omaha and movers near omaha nebraska. These longer keyword phrases will bring in much higher traffic quality.
Another tip for keeping broad match keyword traffic quality high is to use broad match modifiers. Modifiers are used to limit the scope of broad match keywords. Modifiers are added to any or all words of a broad match keyword phrase, and any words that have a modifier on them have to be included in the user’s search in order for your ad to be eligible to show. And modifiers are the “+” sign.
For example, if you have a broad match keyword moving companies in omaha and you modified “omaha” then your keyword would look like moving companies in +omaha and whatever searches your ads showed up on would have to include “omaha” in the keyword search. So someone could search “moving companies” and your ad wouldn’t show up, but if they searched “show me all moving companies in the Omaha metro area” your ad would show up.
Using broad match modified keywords and lots of variations of them can be a good way to get the high volume benefits of broad match keywords while still keeping the traffic quality strong.
Whenever we turn on a new AdWords campaign we’re usually certain of the results we’re going to get, but just like with working on a car engine, sometimes things don’t always go perfect. And sometimes we turn on a campaign and it’s a lot lower volume than we expected and we’ve got to find a way to get the traffic volume up. When that happens, one of our go-to strategies to raise the traffic volume is to experiment with long broad match keywords and modified broad match keywords.
