Module 3 - Keywords - Winning audience construction strategy

Where do you start when choosing keywords for a video campaign?

You start with the search campaigns you already have running, because they show you which keywords are already creating conversions before you ever touch video.

I am here in one of my clients' accounts, a network marketing business, looking at their account over its entire lifetime. They have got a keyword set up as a phrase match, network marketing in quotes, which will show the ad to anyone searching a phrase containing network marketing, how do I get started in network marketing, network marketing courses, and so on, but it would not show for network business marketing, because that is not the exact phrase. If this customer has run decent search campaigns before, it is really easy to see which keywords you should be adding to a video campaign, simply by going into the keyword section of the search campaigns.

How do you tell which keywords are actually working?

By sorting the keyword and search term reports by impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost and conversions, campaign by campaign, to see which ones are actually converting.

Once you open up the keywords and search terms for a campaign, you can search by impression size to see which keywords are triggering the most impressions, the number of clicks, the click-through rate, which gives you an idea of relevancy, and then average cost per click, total cost, number of conversions and cost per conversion. This is broken down by campaign, so you can compare cost per click and conversion rate across different campaigns and see what is actually working. The same report exists over in video campaigns, showing which keywords are triggering, what they cost, how many conversions came from each, and what the cost per gain was. This is somewhere you should be looking on pretty much a weekly basis, you are not going to gather meaningful data hour by hour unless you are running some really big budgets.

What does it mean if a keyword gets impressions and views but no conversions?

Nine times out of ten it means you have got the wrong keywords or the wrong audience, and it is a sign to add negative keywords.

If you sort by conversion rate, you can find keywords that have triggered plenty of activity but nothing useful. I found one example, mlm objections, that had eight hundred impressions and an eighteen percent view rate at a minimal cost, but no conversions. When you see high impressions, high views and a good click-through rate but no conversions, ask yourself why. It is worth understanding the relationship between conversion rate, impressions and views, because that is how you learn why a campaign is succeeding or failing. Do not be afraid to add negative keywords for the ones that are not working for you.

How do you turn your winning keywords into an audience?

Download the keyword list to a Google Sheet, sort it by conversions from largest to smallest, and pull the top converting keywords, normally around fifty, into a custom audience in Google Ads.

Go into the keywords page, download it as a Google Sheet, highlight the whole sheet, and use Data, Sort Range, with "data has header row" ticked so the columns stay at the top, sorting by conversions from largest to smallest. That surfaces your highest converting keywords, and I would normally take the top fifty, accepting there will be a bit of duplication. Paste those keywords into a notepad first, because if you paste them straight from a Google Sheet into Google Ads it treats the whole thing as one block of text rather than a list of terms. Pasting from notepad brings in the full list properly, and Google Ads will show you the number of impressions and a breakdown by gender and age, for example a set of terms that skews significantly more male than female, or drops off sharply after fifty five to sixty five, which tells you whether to target something like twenty five to fifty four instead of eighteen upwards. At that point you can save the list as a custom audience, "network marketing keywords" for instance, of people who have searched any of those terms on Google.

Why build an audience from keywords instead of just running a long keyword list?

Because someone who has actually searched several of those exact terms is more actively researching the space and more likely to buy than someone who has just searched one.

Rather than mixing a long list of keywords into an existing campaign, I would create a separate campaign to test the audience on its own. The difference is that a keyword in a campaign fires when someone types that exact term, whereas an audience built from searches finds people who are more than a one-off, someone typing in a single competitor's name might mean nothing, but someone who has typed in two or three related terms is genuinely researching. Mixing that keyword-based audience with topic targeting, tested against your existing keyword list, is a strong strategy, though as always it will come out properly in the testing.