PPC Essentials Part 1: Mastering Keywords To Optimize PPC Results

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Garrett Craigan, who is our lead of paid media here at Bateman Collective. He’s one of the best PPC masters that I know. We’re going to talk all about keywords and negative keywords, which is just the first part of the eight essential elements to having a successful PPC campaign. We’ll dive into all the details, including things you don’t normally hear about, and some of the biggest mistakes we see investors making that, if fixed, would lead to better PPC results. How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Hey, doing excellent, thank you. I know we had planned for some banter, but we’re completely awkward as people, and I think that made this impossible."

"Yes, we suck at being people."

"Yeah, that's right. So, we’re good digital marketing robots, and I guess we’ll just jump right into the stuff today. Sorry to everyone listening, we don’t have anything fun to say."

"The topic for today is the beginning of a series where we go over the eight things that are essential to having a successful PPC campaign. On the flip side, these are also the eight things we see a lot of investors doing wrong when it comes to their PPC. So, it's going to be pretty in-depth. This is definitely for you nerdy investors out there who want to get deeper into the weeds of PPC. We’ll discuss technical terms and all that stuff, but if you’re familiar with the platform, you’ll find this interesting. As I said, there are eight key points, so today we’re just starting with numbers one and two, which are keywords and negative keywords, followed by ads."

"To give everyone a little context, we do a lot of audits. It happens all the time—an investor comes to us and says, 'I don’t know what’s going wrong with this; I’m managing my own PPC, or I’m working with an agency, and it’s just not working the way I want.' They ask us to take a look. We look into the account, see what’s going on, and try to figure out why they’re not getting results. Pretty commonly, there’s this interaction between negative keywords and keywords. Do you have any specific thoughts on the common mistakes you’re seeing?"

"Yeah, I think that in the space, there’s a tendency to focus too much on the 'sexy' parts of PPC, like dynamic localization or different ad types. But really, at the core of PPC, we are bidding on search terms. Having good keywords and search terms in place means you’re likely to get good results. But if that’s not there, everything else will underperform. It’s crucial that your keywords are targeting the right intent and that you’re not bidding on searches that are out of market or of lower quality."

"Yeah, you basically just said what I’ve been saying in so many audits recently, just with different words. I often tell clients something along the lines of, 'I’d love to talk about all the problems you have here, but you’re not even eligible for most of the problems that could arise because you don’t even have the right search terms.' That’s step one. People think fixing that will make their campaigns great, but it’s just how you get from an F to a C. Having good search terms is the bare minimum. The rest of the work won’t fix that, just like how you can’t build on a bad foundation."

"I think the root of that issue for a lot of companies comes from not understanding the difference between keywords and search terms. A lot of people don’t really get that. Could you explain it?"

"Sure. The search term is what’s actually being searched—the exact words typed by the customer, like 'how can I sell my house fast for cash?' That’s the search term. A keyword is what we tell Google is the general intent we want to target. So, we can target a keyword, but the search term may not exactly match it. Most of the time, it doesn’t."

"Right. Most of the time, we’re targeting a general search, and Google tries to match it as best it can. That’s why it’s important to go into your search terms to see what you’re actually paying for. You could have good keywords but still end up with poor search terms. That’s where things can get stuck if you’re not diligent in pruning and cleaning up those search terms."

"Exactly, that makes sense. I think it would be helpful to provide an example. A common scenario is that you have a keyword like 'We Buy Houses,' but then your search term ends up being 'Buy Houses.' You’re telling Google you want to target 'We Buy Houses,' and you’re seeing that you’re getting clicks and leads. Everything looks good on the surface. But when you dig deeper and see what someone actually typed into Google when your ad showed up, they might have searched 'Buy Houses.' To Google, taking the word 'We' out doesn’t seem like a big difference, but anyone in the industry knows that 'Buy Houses' is buyer traffic, and 'We Buy Houses' is seller traffic. They’re really different in nature."

"Exactly. I also think a lot of people don’t realize how many search terms there are. It’s insane. I did an analysis at one point—it's been a while since I did it, so I’d be curious to do it again—but at that time, I found that across our clients, over 80% of the leads they got came from search terms that only had one click in the entire history of their account. People think they have these five main search terms they’re going heavy on, and that’s where all their leads will come from. But in reality, there are thousands of search terms, and most of the leads come from long-tail search terms, which are more specific phrases. Very few come from the big, obvious ones."

"Interesting. Yeah, I read a stat that there are a thousand brand new search terms on Google every single day. So, what was searched historically isn’t static—it’s always changing and evolving. That’s why it’s so important to update your keywords based on what’s happening."

"Now and what's working well now because they're always changing, and those search terms are going to be different every single day. If those aren't being pruned, you're wasting a lot of budget."

"Yeah, the stat that I saw is that about 15% of Google searches each day are completely unique, and they've never been seen before in the history of Google. It rounds out to about 500 million searches every single day."

"That's a better stat than what mine was," Garrett replied. "That's good. I wonder if what you were looking at was a specific account or something or a specific niche because like 500 million and a thousand are really different numbers."

Brandon nodded. "Yeah, but it's insane. And I think this is like marketing stereotype 101, right? Marketers like to put people in boxes. They like to say, 'my customer is this.' I saw this funny post on LinkedIn where someone was just making marketing predictions for 2023, and it was super sarcastic. They said, 'new CEOs and boardrooms are going to come up with customer avatars that are oddly specific in 2023, and it's not going to actually yield any benefit.' Because we do that all the time. We expect people to fit in these boxes like, 'this is who my customer is,' but people are so unique and so different. The way they search for things is different all the time."

"One thing interesting to think about is how many keywords do you really need," Brandon continued. "I've talked to a lot of investors who think the name of the game is almost like guessing what all these search terms are going to be and making a keyword for each one of them. They think, 'Oh, I'm working with this professional PPC company, and the difference they have is they probably just have tens of thousands of keywords, and they know everything that people search.' What would you say about that?"

"I don't think it's as much about having an ideal count of keywords in an account to maximize it," Garrett explained. "It's going to be based on volume, intent, and budget. You can have a thousand keywords in your account, but if your budget is only a thousand bucks a month, you're probably not going to show up for most of those, and you're not going to get enough data for any given keyword to even mean anything. So it has to be based on your budget, your audience, the volume that each keyword can get, the monthly searches that keyword has in a given month. All of those things have to be considered when you're building out an initial keyword structure for an account."

"Yeah, understandable," Brandon replied. "I'm really curious. What's the largest number of keywords you've ever managed in an account, or you've seen?"

"I managed ads for a Fortune 500 company, and they had, I think, in just their account targeting North America, about 8,000 keywords," Garrett said. "And they had an account for each continent, each market."

"Wow, 8,000 keywords!" Brandon exclaimed.

"Yeah, but that was just like a different account per market because of different OCC currencies and things like that," Garrett added.

"Oh, understandable. Interesting," Brandon said. "The reason I ask is because I have a completely ridiculous story. I had one client that had six million keywords."

"Oh my God," Garrett said, shocked.

"Yeah, six million keywords," Brandon repeated. "How many of those had any clicks, impressions?"

"A smaller number," Brandon admitted. "But to be fair, they had like the biggest search term universe of any company I'd ever worked with in my life. Six million keywords."

"And they spent about five million a month," Brandon added. "But still, that's like a dollar a keyword. It's insane."

"Wow, that's crazy," Garrett responded.

"Anyway, that was tangential," Brandon said, getting back on track. "But cut those down, team! I think there's definitely been a shift if we're talking about PPC strategy in terms of the number of keywords. If you're looking back to 2017 PPC, this account that I was talking about, they've been going since 2008 or something, so they've got a lot of history. The world of PPC has changed quite a bit, and it seems like most PPC marketers are on the side that things have changed really significantly in the past decade with keywords."

Garrett nodded. "Yeah, and even in the past three or four years. There have been some big changes."

"Yeah, what are some of those big changes?" Brandon asked.

Garrett explained, "There's been a big change in the way platforms work. The biggest change has been with match types. Google has become a lot more loose and liberal with how it matches your keyword with search terms. They say it's to give the algorithm a bit more freedom to match intent, not just the actual keyword. But really, I think it's because they want to sell inventory on searches that, in general, aren't being bid on by advertisers. That's a big change. What was once an exact match keyword is now much looser than it was a couple of years ago."

Brandon clarified for the listeners, "Just to clarify for everybody listening, if you're not familiar with match types, basically when you give Google your keyword—you say 'We Buy Houses,' for example—there are different match types. Historically, how it used to be was exact match meant someone had to type in 'We Buy Houses' exactly. And if they typed in 'We Buy House,' it wouldn't show up. Then there's phrase match, which would be like 'We Buy Houses' has to be in there somewhere. So they could type in 'We Buy Houses California,' and you would still show up. Then there's broad match, which was like you type in 'We Buy Houses,' but then someone searches 'We Buy Ugly Houses,' and you still show up."

Garrett chuckled. "Yeah, and if you ever want to learn how to completely evade an issue and give yourself license to do anything you want, go read Google's help articles about what match types mean these days."

Brandon laughed. "It's hilarious! They basically say, 'If you do this match type, it means all of these things and also whatever we want.'"

"Pretty much every article from Google now just says at the bottom, 'Also whatever we want,'" Garrett agreed.

"In their own words, 'based on the algorithm's learnings,'" Brandon added.

"Yes, exactly!" Garrett replied. "So wild."

Brandon continued, "So the way it used to work is you could have your keyword 'apple,' and maybe you'd get 'apple,' but now you could get 'apples' or even 'orange,' and Google says, 'They're both fruit, so close enough.' It's different, especially when you get to some of these nuances like 'We Buy Houses' versus 'Buy Houses,' which mean really different things."

"How do you think the way to deal with keywords has adapted because of that?" Brandon asked.

Garrett explained, "So there was a very popular keyword structure used in the past called SCAG, which stood for Single Keyword Ad Group. Basically, what people would do is build out one ad group with an exact match type of their keyword. The theory—and what worked historically—was they would force each search term into one ad group, and then it would match the search with the keyword, the ad with the landing page, and have really good matching across the board."

Brandon nodded as Garrett continued, "But since things have changed, and match types have become much looser, that old way of doing things is pretty obsolete now. It's much harder to match one search with one keyword because Google's algorithm is so loose. So it has become increasingly important, as Google gives more freedom to the algorithm, to have a really fine-tuned negative keyword list."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon responded. "It probably is helpful to dive a bit deeper into negative keywords because they function differently than positive keywords."

Garrett agreed. "Exactly. So, you could say there are two types of keywords: positive and negative. Positive keywords are telling Google what you want to show up for, while negative keywords are telling Google what you don't want to show up for. Negative trumps positive, meaning if you have a positive keyword like 'We Buy Houses' phrase match, and you want that included, but you also have a negative keyword for the word 'scam,' if someone searches 'We Buy Houses companies that are scams,' you wouldn't show up because of that negative keyword."

Brandon chuckled. "You'd need to also have the plural version, but yeah."

"Right," Garrett laughed. "If we didn’t have that negative keyword in there, we would show up, and obviously, that would be a poor click. So that highlights the importance of having a negative keyword list because Google doesn’t know the difference between a good and bad search, but we do."

"You ever played Whac-A-Mole?" Brandon asked with a grin.

Garrett shook his head. "Actually, I don't think I have, but I know the game."

"Okay," Brandon continued. "If you want a visual representation of adding negative keywords, Whac-A-Mole is the most appropriate thing because they’re always popping up. There are always new bad search terms that Google is making you pay for just because. In the same way that there are those 15% of Google searches every day that are completely unique and could be beneficial for you, they could also be negative for you if they’re irrelevant."

Garrett nodded. "Exactly. And I’ve seen so many people play this game for years—literally years—and never really get anywhere because they’re not keeping up with negative keywords that they theoretically need."

Brandon leaned in, interested. "So what’s the key to staying ahead of that curve? How do you keep your negative keyword list sharp?"

Garrett explained, "It’s about constant pruning and reviewing search terms. You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to consistently check your search term reports, see what’s coming in, and add negative keywords based on that data. It’s ongoing, and it’s vital to the long-term success of any PPC campaign."

Brandon nodded thoughtfully. "Makes sense. I think a lot of people underestimate how dynamic search behavior really is and how it evolves over time."

"Totally," Garrett replied. "And it’s not just about quantity, it’s about quality. Even if you have fewer keywords in your account, if they’re well-tuned and paired with strong negatives, you’ll get better results than if you’re trying to go after everything and spread your budget too thin."

Brandon smiled. "That’s solid advice. I think people are going to get a lot out of this."

"Glad to hear that," Garrett said with a grin. "Anything else you’re curious about?"

Brandon paused for a moment, then said, "Actually, yeah. What about ad copy? Have you seen a shift in what types of ad copy are resonating with audiences today compared to, say, a few years ago?"

Garrett nodded. "Oh, absolutely. With all the algorithm changes, it's become increasingly important to have ad copy that speaks directly to user intent. You can no longer just rely on generic copy. It needs to be specific, relevant, and engaging. Plus, Google's emphasis on Quality Score makes it even more crucial that your ad copy matches your keywords and landing page experience. So, in short, it's about alignment—making sure everything flows seamlessly from keyword to ad to landing page."

Brandon looked intrigued. "Interesting. I feel like that makes the whole process more cohesive, right?"

"Exactly," Garrett affirmed. "And when everything is cohesive, not only do you see better performance, but you also see higher engagement and lower costs per click because Google rewards that consistency with a higher Quality Score."

Brandon grinned. "Man, this has been super insightful. Thanks so much for sharing all of this."

"Of course!" Garrett replied. "Always happy to help."

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