When starting a new SEM campaign, there are a million different ways you can improve your success rate. Remember, when someone clicks on your links it costs money, so making sure your leads are qualified is extremely important and cost efficient.
There are 2 things that will significantly help achieve this goal and won’t take you a lot of time: Geotargeting and the addition of negative keywords.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting should be one of the first things you do when launching a campaign. In the settings section of your campaign, you are allowed to pick locations that you want to target. You can either choose individual areas (by town or zip code) or you can decide to select a miles radius around a centralized location.
By doing this you are ensuring that the clicks you are going to be receiving are coming from qualified leads in your area that can actually travel to your physical location or you can travel to them. Every click is valuable, so it is crucial that you are reaching the right audience. Geotargeting is a powerful tool to help target key areas and, more importantly, avoid others that are outside your range.
Negative Keywords
Another important aspect of a successful campaign is the inclusion of negative keywords. Negative Keywords are used by advertisers to avoid unwanted search queries. If you only sell golf shoes why would you want to show up on a search results page seeking tennis or basketball shoes? Negative keywords, like geotargeting, can ultimately control your campaign budget and keep you from appearing on search results that are not relevant to your business or advertising strategy.
Finding good negative keywords takes time. After a couple of weeks of your campaign, you can run a search query report to see what people have been searching for that lead to your ad being displayed. You may see that you are getting clicks from searches that are not relevant to your product or service and you may even see other keywords out there that pertain to your strategy that you have not yet added to your keyword set. You can then add those terms to your campaign as negative keywords to stop the ads from appearing (and wasting clicks) when those searches are performed. In the example above using tennis shoes, you would add “tennis” as a negative keyword. So from now on when a user types in tennis shoes, your golf shoes product will not show up.
By including negative keywords and geotargeting you will increase your click-through rate (CTR) and your campaign will receive focused clicks instead of clicks that cost you money for no gain. Other benefits include lower cost per click and an increase in ROI.
The next time you are creating a new SEM campaign, do not overlook adding negative keywords and geotargeting. These two small but key elements will help your campaign be more effective and generate a higher ROI giving you way more bang for your buck.
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