Targeting Keywords For Adsense Campaigns

So, what are the problems with the likes of adsense?

Well, I learnt with my first campaign on CompareMortgageRates that you have to be very careful with targeting keywords.

When you look through the list of keywords and the expected traffic on adsense it's very easy to choose all of the high performing keywords. For example, 'Mortgages', 'Remortgages'. But these get loads of search traffic and therefore every man, woman and child with a mortgage site is competing on these keywords. They are therefore expensive - some charging £10 or more per click. Great if you know you can convert those visitors.

A customer of mine started running his own adsense campaign in the summer. He went for the general, high volume keywords. Yet his shop was very specialist and most of the visitors weren't finding what they were looking for. Hence, only about 1% of the visitors arriving through PPC were buying.

I convinced him to remove some of the high volume keywords (I did want him to remove them all) and replace them with specific product related keywords. The traffic into his site dropped by a half, but the conversions increased to 3%. They were also cheaper keywords to buy.

So for less than half the original cost he had trebbled his sales. Now, if only he'd remove all of the general keywords from his list...