When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?

It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.

Previously I has said that you shouldn’t use broad match in AdSense campaigns. While I still lean in that direction, it would be more correct to encourage you to test both phrase and broad match and then base your decision on hard conversions data.

An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding

How these differ:

Broad Match:

Broad Match actually matches the words from the phrase any order. What is a little harder to follow is broad also matches synonyms for your phrase. If you have the phrase “tennis shoes” in your campaign, you ad may be triggered by a search for “tennis sneakers”. So the complete phrase has to be there, but Google may accept a synonym for part or all of your phrase. So if your phrase is “tennis shoes” won’t get matched for “tennis elbows” or “running shoes”.

Here is the link to Google’s help on this topic: What are keyword matching options and What is broad match?

Phrase Match:

Exact Match:

Exact matches only when all the words are used in the exact order, but with no other words in the query.

Yahoo Marketing

Yahoo adds some confusion in that it uses the terms “standard and “advanced”. “Standard” is similar to Google’s “exact”, but introduces some minor variations to your phrase, including plurals and misspellings. “Advanced” is analogous to Google’s “broad”.

See: Overview: Match Types

So what should you use, broad or phrase??

I think the best answer is “it depends” and some testing will be needed to ferret out the differences. I have tried both with a number of clients and usually find that “phrase” performs better than “broad”. I say usually because there are other factors that affect the results.

You might come to the conclusion that “broad” was better because your ad will be triggered on a wider range of phrases. After all, your ad should accurately identify what you are selling and keep your clicks relevant. However, Google and Yahoo both use click-thru rate as part of there formula to determine what to charge. So, if “broad match” causes your ad to be presented for searches that are irrelevant to your ads, your click-thru rate will be lower and you CPC rate will go up. More relevant matches will drive more clicks, improve your click-thru rate and drive down the CPC.

See: Quality Score

So again I come back to the importance of using “cost per conversion” (also known at cost per acquisition, CPA), as your metric instead of “cost per click” (CPC). As long as you have a way to measure cost per conversion you have a reasonable handle on the value of the phrase and can make an educated choice about what match perform best at the least cost.

Added 3/10/2008 >> Another good article on this topic: Focus On Exact Match

I have blogged about this breaking Adwords campaigns up before, but recent events merit revisiting this approach to PPC management. While employed as a in-house marketing manager, I was faced running campaigns that included some very high-cost phrases (in excess of $10). This select group of phrases appeared to be the only words that were converting. We measured demos, and trips to the contact page as conversions. We received conversions only once out of eight or nine clicks (at $10/click a conversion cost $80 to $90). Moreover at $10/click, I was quickly exhausting my daily budget for few paltry conversions. This was clearly a chicken and egg scenario, I needed leads to get sales, but I needed sales to pay for generating leads.

A typical sale was between $2,500 and $5,000. When you divided new sales revenue by leads over the span of a year, we had an average revenue of $1000/lead. So I felt paying up to $100/lead was reasonable.  However, we had a sales cycle of 3 to 6 months and since every lead doesn’t close, I needed to temper my enthusiasm for getting new leads with the realities of cash flow.   

My first thought was to separate my AdWords campaigns by keyword cost, dividing words into producing and non-producing campaigns. This way I thought I could focus my ad dollars on these high-dollar phrases where they were producing the highest number of leads.

Then something unexpected happened. Prior to dividing my campaigns up, my high-dollar, high-conversion words had been consuming each days ad spend. After placing high-dollar phrases in a standalone campaign with its own budget, lower cost words were able to run for longer periods. Statistics emerged showing that while the lower-cost ($3.50/click) phrases converted at a lower rate, the cost per conversion was half the cost of the high-dollar phrases.

As a result of this exercise, we abandoned the high-cost phrases, reduced our ad spend by half, while increasing our exposure and maintaining constant flow of leads.

I now believe you need to take this a step further and separate campaigns into high, medium, and low (or exposure) campaigns.

High and Medium campaigns are those which convert to leads at a solid rate. Here, you have to look closely at your cost per lead (annual new sales revenue/leads) and your cash flow to determine what you can afford to pay. Phrases whose cost start moving into stratosphere can be abandoned or throttled in separate campaigns so they don’t exhaust ad budgets prematurely.  

The low-cost campaigns provide exposure and build name recognition in exchange for an occasional lead. If phrases in this group become performers be sure to move them in to higher performing campaigns to be sure they have adequate budgets for them perform. These low-cost/ exposure campaigns may also include words that have become too expensive to keep within the top 5 positions on the first page, but might continue to provide exposure and even an occasional click from lower positions or even second page results.

So what position should you shoot for? While I like to stay above the fold in position 3-5, there is certainly and argument to settle for an occasional click with a lower cost from a lower position. - but again, I think it all comes down to cost per conversion and what you can afford to pay for a lead.