If you might be wondering why your PPC account is far from reaching positive ROI figures, you might consider to have your campaigns go on a keyword diet.
Less for more and the long tail fanatics
A large amount of keywords in your Adwords or Yahoo! account might be very risky and could cause your costs to go way up, pushing you overall account ROI to Siberian proportions.
Many advertisers believe that stuffing adgroups with new keywords lead to an increase in traffic and therefore, in conversion.
Long tail enthusiasts tell you all the time, you need to enlarge your tail for reasons I need not to explain. They forget to mention that all those keywords alone cost little, but that all together a fortune. If they all converted, well that´s a different story, but most of the times they don´t.
What´s more, controlling the kind of traffic you buy is a management skill on itself. For instance, the more keywords you have on “Broad”, the more likely you are to bring unqualified traffic.
Google reps (account maximizers) are also very keen on telling you your account needs more keywords (otherwise you loose market share); or that with your new account settings you will be able to manage up to 10 thousand keywords (wow!). Guess why.
Focus on the head
Whether you are dealing with “head” or “tail” keywords, focus on the HEAD of both. (I consider you have an account whose structure strives for relevancy at all times and is organized as such that its adgroups contain same kind of keyword phrases, but just with different combination). When you carry out a keyword analysis of a given adgroup, you realize that only 5 or maybe 10 (max!) keyphrases drive all the traffic -that convert-. Focus on those.
More for less
If your aim is to make money with Adwords and keep a healthy ROI positive account, then be tight on your keywords. If you are a large advertiser, spending 3 figures on a monthly basis you need to watch out.
Having tons of keywords might bring you tons of traffic, but increase the likelyhood that the costs of non-converting keywords canibalize the ROI of the converting ones.
Besides, there are plenty of things you can do with the budget you save up: robusting the bid of converting keywords, creating a new, targeted keyword category, experiment on a new channel, or just take a holiday.
