Why Cheap & Free Aren’t Always Good Negative PPC Keywords
Hitwise posted an interesting case study yesterday about the popularity of cheap vs free searches in the UK.
I find that many people regularly set “cheap” and “free” as negative pay per click keywords without testing it’s performance first. In my opinion this is a mistake, firstly because cheap/free searches are very popular so by doing this you’re missing out on a large amount of extra clicks and also people searching for cheap flights might actually be willing to pay for averagely priced flights instead!
This might not always be successful, especially for luxury goods, but there’s certainly no harm in setting up a low-budget campaign containing some exact match cheap/free keyword phrases to test how well this converts into sales.
Nice article, I’ve posted it on semtags.org
Comment by Ash — September 14, 2007 @ 12:57 pm
Try telling that to your client - who does’nt want to be asscoiated with “Cheap” - but I agree ignoring words such as “cheap” is crazy.
Comment by Jocko — September 14, 2007 @ 3:02 pm
Basically, when someone searches for Free he’s broke, so it’s not worthy to sell anything, true?
Comment by Scorpiono — September 16, 2007 @ 9:00 pm
Like anything AdWords, it’s worth testing results in the wild.
Comment by Quality Nonsense — September 20, 2007 @ 4:53 pm
I had a terrible time with google adwords, everytime I set up and started doing well my ppc’s went up from 15p to £5, why did they keep doing this?? I had to stop in the end. Fortunately I have now found a good ppc management strategy which works well for me but does the price per click just go up for me or does it happen to lots of people?? You just can’t go into this with your eyes closed - Google made a lot of money from me:-(
Comment by Asci — September 22, 2007 @ 2:48 pm