Yes, you can spend your day programming in Python and managing AdWords campaigns, and at the same time enjoy the simple pleasures of gardening. Unfortunately, professional reflexes are never far away.
AdWords Exclusions and Pruning Suckers: same fight
In the garden…
For those unfamiliar with growing tomatoes in pots on a concrete terrace, pruning suckers requires some explanation. To get truly flavorful tomatoes, it is essential that the plant’s energy is not dispersed into useless growth. However, between the main stem and the secondary stems, shoots often develop that are made up only of leaves and never bear fruit. In order to avoid wasting the plant’s energy on leaf development (and incidentally to save water), the vigilant gardener will make sure to eradicate the suckers by pruning them by hand or with secateurs.
…just like in an AdWords campaign
But why this vegetable-garden digression? Because ultimately, to properly grow your AdWords advertising campaign, you have to proceed in the same way.
Let’s assume that you want to offer web marketing services (just as an example 🙂 ). To do this, you buy the keyword “web marketing” in AdWords. Bad luck, you didn’t know it, but by default, your keywords are triggered on broad match, which means that a person who types “Web Marketing Job Offer” will see your ad.
As with tomatoes, you have limited energy (a budget). Paying to attract job seekers when you’re not looking for them, admit it, is quite a waste.
Ripe tomatoes and prospects
So, if you want to focus your budgets on the most mature prospects, make full use of exclusion functions.
To do this, two complementary approaches:
- Use regular expressions when broad queries are unnecessary ( [web marketing] or “marketing company” for example ). Be careful not to overdo it, however: in many cases, internet users are unlikely to type a single word in their queries.
- Use search term reports to exclude unwanted words (“job” in our example).
Happy harvesting!
