Growing Your PPC Keyword Portfolio

In a recent post I laid out the three areas of PPC optimisation that I think are most important to any campaign, and when done well these key points can provide an excellent basis for a well optimized, high ROI campaign. To recap these areas were:

• Campaign structure
• Evolve your keyword list based on actual queries
• Build traffic from the tail upwards

The first of these was covered here and now I want to cover of the second point and discuss the practical side of expanding a paid search keywords list.

It's worth stating at this point that the second two items in that list are quite closely linked.  By this I mean that, amongst other things, building out the size of the keyword tail within your account should help you improve the proportion of total campaign traffic driven from this higher converting area.

So without further ado, here are the essential tasks that you should be doing to help expand your keyword list in a way that ensures you end up with valuable, relevant search terms within the campaign:

Google Keyword Tool

Available from directly within your AdWords account via the navigation tabs or externally, the keyword tool provides you with expanded keyword ideas with accompanying data based on either examples or on your site content.

Being able to get valuable data such as local search volumes and competition metrics allows you to make intelligent decisions about which keywords would be worthwhile adding to the campaign.

Qucik Tip: If you are like me and like to do as much work in Excel as possible, by 'starring' items you can build up a raw list to the categorise etc offline. The benefit of 'starring' rather than using the check box is that the items remain selected as you navigate through different pages.

Like all these tasks I'll talk about in this post, the more often you repeat and improve, the more useful keywords you will unearth.

Search Query Report

My number absolute favourite campaign improvement task. Why? Rarely do you get a report which is so straight-forward, yet so actionable. You can run this in either within AdWords or if you are using Google Analytics, within the Advertising > AdWords  > Matched Queries section:

It will basically give you a list of the actual search queries which triggered your adverts. From there it's a simple as either adding the reported variations to the account normally, or adding them as negatives if they are irrelevant.

Often I like to combine the output of this report with the keyword tool mentioned above, exporting the new variations I find and using them as 'seeds' to hunt for further keywords which may be missing from the account.

If you are using the Google Analytics version, you will also get the added value of being able to get onsite metrics such as the ROI, bounce rate and pages/visit. This makes your decision process when deciding what to do with keywords even more straight-forward.

Organic Ideas

Nothing beats actual user feedback – for me the search query equivalent of this is the organic keyword report in your web analytics package. There is not a more relevant 'tail' resource for your site than this report. I like the fact that this tells you what hundreds and thousands of users deemed to be relevant keywords before they ended up on your site. Many of them may be particularly unique and not worth including in a paid search campaign (see below), but so often I will find ideas that I just wouldn't have thought of (hey, I'm only one mind!).

As with the search query report in Google Analytics, you will be doing this in your analytics package of choice and will be able to get insight into visitor behaviour to help make the right call on how valuable potential additions are.

Manually Iterating

Although the least 'intelligent' way of expanding your lists, often it can be useful to ensure you've got great keyword coverage by expanding all your findings from the above techniques for all your keyword groups.

For example, if I find the keyword 'cheap blue widgets london' then I'd potentially want to add this to my ad groups for other colours of widgets :

cheap red widgets london
cheap yellow widgets london

and then for other locations:

cheap blue widgets bristol
cheap blue widgets glasgow
cheap yellow widgets bristol
cheap yellow widgets glasgow
cheap red widgets bristol
cheap red widgets glasgow

and so forth.

This is a fairly straight-forward task and can be done your preferred method, which could be using Excel, the AdWords editor Formula words or a tool such as mergewords.com.

The real trick here is to know when to stop iterating – too many terms with no chance of getting shown can just lead to a clumsy, hard to manage campaign structure (#link). Unlike the other techniques there is no data to analyse hear, it's all down to your intuition as an account manager.

So that's my core tool set for expanding keywords lists, always with the aim of ensuring we have a highly relevant, well targeted long tail.  If you have any further ideas you want to share, please feel free to add them in the comments below.

[Leading image courtesy of Caleb Roenigk]