Keywords can drive you nuts

Pay Per Click for Dummies

When choosing keywords for your PPC campaign you’ve got to keep in mind that you are, in some way, trying to read your potential customers (aka ticket buyers) minds. You are looking to choose those keywords that directly relate to what you are trying to accomplish. At the same time, determine how your target audience may search for what you are offering.

There are tons books written on the subject of keywords and for good reason. Companies like Google and Yahoo have made billions of dollars from keywords. Billions. Anyone looking to sell or promote anything on the internet will have to deal with keywords. The better keywords are handled, and understood, the more successful your online efforts will be.

Let’s jump into an example. You’re holding a car raffle to benefit your organization, for a 1965 Corvette, and you are looking to run a PPC campaign to promote your raffle. You’ve already made your Google Adwords Ad and you are ready to choose the keywords that go with that ad.

For our discussion a single word like “car” is a keyword, a phrase like “1965 corvette” is a keyword, and a long phrase like”1965 corvette raffle in new york” is also a keyword. When I say ‘keyword’ it applies to any single word or phrase that you’ll target your ad on. ‘Kay?

Now, in our 1965 corvette raffle example your first thought might be to use as many keywords as possible to get your ad to show to as many different people as possible, right? You may choose “car, corvette, raffle, car raffle, charity raffle, corvette car, corvette raffle, 1965 corvette raffle, free corvette, raffle tickets, fundraising, your organization name” and so on. This can be a huge mistake. In choosing a wide range of keywords you will be displaying your ad to a bunch of folks who may not really care about your raffle and, in turn, waste a ton of your organizations money.

The entire point of running a PPC campaign is to elicit a desired response from someone. You make an ad, you want someone interested in buying raffle tickets to find that ad, click on it and then buy a ticket. Every time someone clicks on the ad and does not buy a ticket you’re out the cost of that click. It’s going to happen, of course, but you want to keep those events as infrequent as possible. It seems obvious I know. But always keep in mind your desired result (ticket sale) as we go on. Let’s choose some keywords.