Today, I wanted to talk about optimizing your keywords for better CTR. This is specifically for YSM, but could be applied to Bing or AdWords. Lately, I’ve been seeing better results in having fewer, more targeted keywords then a ton of random, possibly related keywords.

The reason being that I wanted people interested in the specific item I’m trying to promote. I don’t want to attract ‘readers’ or random surfers. For example if I wanted to sell dog supplies (food, containers, toys, etc), but I was bidding on ‘dog’ as a keyword I would most likely get plenty of impressions but low clicks. My ad would show up if someone was searching for ‘dog trainers’ or ‘dog bites’, etc. What this does is give a lower CTR percentage on my overall campaign. Low CTR % will then raise my keyword costs since my ads are not targeted and performing well.

What I like to do is to start with 50 or so keywords that are fairly specific to what I’m offering. I then let the campaign run for a few days.  I then look for keywords that have high impressions but low clicks (poor CTR) and I pause the keywords. Your overall campaign or ad CTR % should go up. Personally, I like to hit around 2% CTR. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but in my experience, that seems good. I’m usually rewarded with higher quality score and lower cost keywords.

I’ve seen it mentioned with AdWords to create a ad for every keyword (using AdWords Editor and other tools to automate the process). And pausing ads with low CTR %. This will keep your keywords bids down overall, since each ad will have a high CTR. I’ve yet to try this, but I’m planning on firing up my AdWords campaigns again for additional testing.