Wasted Money for Bad Keywords Matching

Seth has a legitimate gripe about an AdWords ad that falsely promised to help him get replacement keys for his car. But in fairness to the company behind the ad, Google actually makes it awfully hard for you to know exactly which search phrases are triggering your keyword matches.

Google’s reporting interface groups clicks by the keywords you bought, not the actual search phrases that triggered them. The latter information is available, but not from Google. You have to scan your log files to find them. And since log files generally order search phrases by popularity, unless something using the word “keys” is in your top 50 or so searches, you’ll probably never see it because it’s way down in the search tail.

Of course, I can’t resist the chance to promote Click Thru Stats, one of my companies which, among other things, does captures all search phrases and allow you to analyze them and, in this case, come to the decision to put “-keys” in your keyword matching parameters in AdWords.

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