Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

Paid search is often touted as the perfect advertising medium, in which ads appear only for those individuals who are actually searching for the advertiser’s product right at that moment. However, while clever search engine technology goes a long way towards achieving this ideal, the “match made in heaven” of paid search depends on the search engine’s ability to determine exactly what the user wants and exactly what the advertiser is offering. A failure on either end is likely to result in an unqualified ad impression, when the ad appears for a user whose query is not actually related to the advertiser’s product. It may also result in an unqualified click, when the user clicks on one of these inappropriate ads anyway. This wastes the advertiser budget and frustrates the user, yet it is a remarkably common occurrence. In this article I explain how the language-savvy paid search advertiser can take advantage of the full range of paid search keyphrase matching options in order to avoid unqualified impressions and clicks, and thus maximize ROI.

This morning I ran a Google search for the term allergy to medication. Among the natural search results, there appeared several sites with information about allergic reactions to medicines, but along the right-hand side of the search results page there appeared three pay-per-click (PPC) ads, all for medications that treat nasal allergy symptoms. It is as though the PPC side of the search engine failed to recognize that a query about an “allergy to medication” is not the same as a query about “allergy medication.” In a similar case, the search term feline kidney disease currently returns PPC ads for several human kidney disease treatments. Amusingly, a search for wall treatment to repair crack returns several ads for drug rehabilitation centers. These unqualified impressions will either lower the ads’ click-through-rate, which hurts the ads’ rankings, or result in unqualified clicks by careless or confused users. In either case, they reduce the campaign’s overall ROI.

We may wonder, “Isn’t Google more linguistically sophisticated than that?” The answer is that some search engines, including Google, empower the advertiser to carefully manage exactly how keyphrases are matched. But with this power comes greater responsibility, because it is the advertiser-rather than the ingenious Google matching algorithm-who determines when the ads will appear. So how can we use this technology to our advantage and avoid unqualified impressions?

1. Effective use of matching options and keyphrase selection
Google allows users four types of keyphrase matching options, known as exact match, phrase match, broad match, and embedded match. The drug rehabilitation centers mentioned above are probably using broad matching for the keyphrase crack treatment, which means that their ad shows up on all possible permutations of these words, such as crack addiction treatment and wall treatment to repair crack. Effective management of their matching options and keyword list could remedy this problem, and get their ad to appear only for crack treatment and crack addiction treatment. The goal is to get broad enough coverage to get all the relevant variants, but exclude the unqualified variants. This is often a challenging problem that requires detailed understanding of both the search engine algorithm and the product being advertised.

2. Effective use of negative keyphrases
A keyphrase tells a search engines when to show a certain ad (for example, whenever the user types the phrase kidney disease). A negative keyphrase does the opposite, telling the search engine when not to show that ad (for example, not when the query also includes the word feline). The same human kidney treatment provider who shows up for feline kidney disease also shows up when I type in information on kidney beans, presumably because they have bought the broad match keyphrase kidney information. By adding the negative keywords feline and bean, they could prevent this from happening in the future, and improve their ROI.

All major search engines make negative keyphrase specification available for no additional charge, because it is in their best interest-as well as advertisers’ best interest-to ensure that the ads only appear for appropriate queries. An effectively run campaign may have dozens of negative keyphrases, depending on which search terms the ads are targeting. However, despite the obvious ROI-maximizing potential, this option is one of the most under-utilized tools available to paid search advertisers.

There are several reasons for this. First, a goal of many SEM campaigns is to maximize exposure, so excluding irrelevant visitors is not an obvious priority. Advertisers should keep in mind that getting more clicks does not necessarily mean getting more exposure, if some of the clicks bring unqualified visitors to the site.

Second, identifying the right negative keyphrases before the start of a campaign requires a high level of awareness and attention to rather technical linguistic details. Fortunately, an easy substitute for linguistic expertise is to identify negative keywords empirically. This means using software like Google Analytics to look at what search terms people entered when they triggered a certain ad. If a drug rehabilitation provider found that the search terms wall crack and repair crack had triggered their ad several times during the first month of the campaign, they would want to subsequently implement the negative keywords wall and repair. If an antihistamine nasal spray advertiser found that their ads for an “allergy treatment” were appearing for the search term homeopathic food allergy treatment, they would want homeopathic and food as negative keywords. For very high-traffic keyphrases like allergy treatment, this can cut thousands of dollars out of a monthly budget and dramatically improve ROI.

Furthermore, there are certain negative keywords that are almost always a good idea, such as free. If you are not offering something free, then you likely do not want to pay for clicks from people who are looking for free offers.

3. Know which options are available in which search engines
Each search engine has different options for managing keyphrase matching. Yahoo! has very few matching parameters, one of which permits “Advanced Matching” and allows much of the technical linguistic finagling to be done automatically, to varying degrees of success. In contrast, Google and MSN have many parameters that must be set manually, and which may apply over the entire campaign or just for specific keyphrases or ad groups. This allows the advertiser greater control, but also puts the na�ve advertiser at risk of squandering much of his or her budget on unqualified clicks, as in the examples above.

Conclusion
Paid search provides advertisers with unparalleled ability to target their audiences, resulting in extremely high ROI relative to other media. However, advertisers should be aware that simply dumping a list of relevant keywords into a search engine does not adequately exploit the potential of paid search. Unlike other media, paid search allows advertisers to specify exactly which potential audience members they do not want. The implementation of negative keywords and keyword-specific advanced matching options enables the advertiser to fully optimize ad distribution and get the most out of the paid search campaign expenditure.