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Hi Fubra, First thing that I can recommend that you do is to go into your AdWords account, then into the campaigns, then into the tab titled 'Keywords'. Once there, click into the tab titled 'Search Terms'. Once in the 'Search Terms' tab, you should see all the keywords that triggered your ad to show. In this tab, look for the specific keyword that is unwanted. Select this keyword by clicking on the selection box on the left and you should see a bar pop up that allows you to select what you want to do with this keyword. Select the option 'Add as Negative Keyword' and that should stop the ad from triggering each time someone searches for the unwanted keywords. Pro-tip: As part of your PPC optimization process, you should also be looking in the 'Search Terms' section of your campaigns/ad groups on a regular basis to see exactly what search terms are triggering your ads to show. There's bound to be search terms that are non-converters and also irrelevant search terms. By continually adding those to your list of negative keywords, you make your PPC campaigns more cost-effective. Good luck!

Do different match types really "compete against each other"  I would think not.  Are you really saying if theres:  [some keyword] and +some +keyword  that Adwords won't only send the closest match type to the auction and ignore others, or, if the bid for [some keyword] is $1.00 and for +some +keyword is $10.00 then you are effectively bidding $10.00 on some keyword.  However this is rare someone would make the broad match bid higher than a closer match type, so in reality I don't see a realistic scenario where a broad match is "competing" against an exact match  to effectively raise the CPC.    If the broad match bid was $0.99 and the exact match was $1.00 the exact match still goes to the auction with $1.00 max CPC.  You only send one keyword to the auction correct?

We've used PPC Protect and our PPC specialist was satisfied. That's all I can say

Hi yes, I agree. What I found really annoying is that some of the product groups they still have a high Search Lost IS because of ad rank but I have submitted every single attribute I could possibly think of, also wrote a very long description of the product with high def. product images and still can't see much improvement. I guess the last thing would be to look into bids but trouble is that the Benchmark CPC is lower than what we bid.. This is all very strange. Trouble is that because I have lots of different product types with different brands I cannot find a proper rule in to put in place for google merchant center to create the product title, therefore, we more likely write each product title separately and still the Lost IS ad rank is still high.. Regards, Sorin

To answer your questions: 1. Yes, these are all different domains (ie. southcarolina-waterbottles.biz, tennessee-waterbottles.biz) but all these domains are hosted on the same ip address. 2. Yes, all the domains basically have the same content and the same links to the same pages on my main url. The only difference on the pages is some verbage that distinguishes each by state. 3. These pages do NOT link to each other; only to my main urls. According to my SEMRUSH backlink audit, which most of these links show up on, these links have high toxicity markers, and most of them are identified by their ip network. I'm worried that Google has identified these and may be doing more than just devaluing them, which would really be the best case scenario. I think they may possibly be harming my overall rankings because of these links. It seems impossible to know. What do you think, based on the information above?

Fair enough. Sounds like you know your stuff. Honestly i'm not sure how quality score is calculated from the broad match. I get it's the potential for the match to be a quality one. As you say the more potential matches may create a lower average. So the less strict you are, the lower the average as the is more of a potential for lesser relevant phrases to match. All i know is a £1.24 click may look close to a £1.48 click but it's 16.2% on top of your cost. So if you don't have a 16.2% increase in ROI you need really think about what is being wasted. A rule that has served me well is: If most of your clicks are from quality scores of 5-7 you are pouring money down the drain, especially if these leads are rarely converting. All the best.

It's not always about CTR.  My 1-3 results still get 650% better conversions than anything I do with Paid.  Google are certainly taking clicks from top positions and I'm seeing my number one positions getting less clicks.  interestingly this is not having any effect whatsoever on the bottom line. What I do see is when I overtake my competitors they start advertising like mad in the Top Ads for those keywords.  But this also doesn't seem to have much of an effect on revenue. I am trialing something new on the mobile.  If you think about it when you type in a query on the mobile you're always going to see the number one ad result first. It's different from desktop where you can kind of completely ignore the ads and look straight at the map for local or the first organic position.  But for Mobile 100% of searches see that number one position and there's nothing else on the screen. So I'm putting together a 'branding' exercise where I focus on getting that number one position for all my keywords and seeing how this affects conversion rates. I wouldn't get too obsessed with click through rates.  Especially with google messing with the layout of the serps so much.  Focus on the bottom line and ROAS.  And I can tell you for nothing that getting in those 1-3 positions is pure gold no matter what the naysayers say about reducing click through rates. Organic is also 100% the best way you can spend your time and effort and budget.  There's been some big changes recently with (I believe) rolling out previously collected rankbrain data.  I don't think it's real time learning.  I think google collect data, test it and roll it out.  And they recently did that so sites with real quality are now picking up a great deal more search.  So the playing field is levelled against the little guys. Ads will always have their place for offers and immediate stuff - although since you can get a quality page indexed in 3 minutes these days and change a title and meta in a couple of days, I think ad words is still only a moderately good way of spending your budget.  But i'll report on how my mobile thing progresses.  I have great hopes for it.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I was considering starting on the Google Adwords course. Are there better options than the Google one?

Hey Mark, Seems like the best way to handle this type of issue is to use a dynamically assigned hidden form value and use a query string to assign the value. You may already be doing this, but if not here's Squarespace's support document for this. As Martijn stated, to maintain this value across multiple page views you will need to implement a session variable or cookie. This can be a time consuming effort and possibly one that may be best ignored for the time being, but if you're looking for more accurate tracking will be your best bet. I reviewed squarespace's support documentation and there does not appear to be a way to natively do this, so speaking with the client's development team is likely best. Let us know if we can be of any further assistance on this! Regards, Trenton

Hey Neil! Short answer: Not Yet. Martijn made a great point, this is likely something that can be done on Google's end, but currently is not a targeting option by default in AdWords. That's not to say there's not a Beta out for it, though I am not aware of one. I'd highly recommend talking to your AdWords Rep and asking if there's a similar Beta available. They will be your best source for this. Veronica's link to google's post about store conversions is the closest existing solution, but not quite what you're wanting. To achieve what you're wanting, you'll have to get store visit conversion tracking and then create an audience and target that audience; however, this will only work for your stores and does not allow you to target any specific place or business that you cannot setup store visit tracking. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any follow-up questions and I'll respond ASAP! Regards, Trenton

Thank you for your responses! The QS did not decrease. Our hosting support said we had a setting wrong on their end that they had to correct. It was causing the website to go down due to being overloaded. Not sure if that would impact our CPC or not... does CPC go up if your site is having short outages? Or was that just a coincidence? I'm the SEO guru... the owner is the PPC guru.

Every page should be constructed in a Google compliant structure and optimized toward specific keywords and user behaviors.

Agreed. We use Google Data Studio.

Hey Chris, I'm going to address your concerns in-line as I think that's the best way for me to clear up any confusion here. "My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page." Your organic rankings will NOT be affected. User engagement signals from AdWords will affect your AdWords quality scores, but under no circumstances will they affect your organic rankings. Google states this publicly, like this example, "Running a Google AdWords campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims.". It does not hurt, it does not help. The data sets are completely separate. Yes, in your data you can see them combined if you wish, but Google Organic does not see your Paid Ad Engagement Metrics. As far as control over your Google Shopping, while Google does sometimes trigger terms that are outside the norm, their matching is generally pretty good. I would encourage you to review the post I linked above and to read other articles about Google Shopping Structures. Your structure is everything for AdWords, but it's especially true for Google Shopping. If you're having trouble with targeting, especially after reviewing the search query report and adding negatives, something is wrong with your setup. Review some posts and see if you find anything that might prove valuable. "So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective." I addressed this a bit above, but I think it's worth reiterating here, your paid ads are not lowering your organic rank under any circumstances. Even if they share a landing page, the paid ads will not affect your organic rankings. "Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations. So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?" This sounds extremely frustrating and I'm sorry to hear that you're having these issues. I'd encourage you to add "Oxycodone" & "Oxycotin" as negative phrase match terms. That should solve your negative targeting issue as described. But even if these issues still continue to arise, rest assured that your organic rankings will not be affected. Hope that helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance. Best regards, Trenton

should we invest more on adwords and organic isn't important like before?? The first question..... Can you make a profit with Adwords?   Most people don't make a profit and don't know it because they don't know their real costs and margins  -- or they hire an SEO who bids without any of that information. Second question...  Can you pull off the rankings?... Most people can't... and that's why they are blowing their dough on Adwords. Answer those questions and you know if you should take Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3 (which is try a different project.

Hi there, Thanks a lot for the link! Appreciate. Katarina

We have an ad grant through Google, so it's free ad money that we'd like to use. Facebook's ad platform seems to be working fine and we use that as well.

Hi Jenna, In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this. For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much. You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.