Interesting Anecdote

[johninbrooklyn]

I sell software and most of our searches are some short variation of the name e.g. Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop CS 7, Adobe Photoshop CS 7.

I did a search query report a few months ago and found that we were getting hundreds of searches a month for a very long nonsensical string e.g. Adobe Photoshop CS 7 Win/Mac CD-ROM.

I knew that nobody was actually going into Google and typing this long string. Especially hundreds of searches worth.

So I created a separate adgroup and put this "extended search" keyword in this ad group. Then I sat back and watched. My average CTR on an ad with these product keywords is 5%. My CTR for a search using the Amazon SKU title was 0.16%.

My first thought was that someone was going to Amazon, copying the product name, and then pasting that search into Google. That may still be happening but the CTR is so low that nobody can be doing that to price compare. Instead I think there is comparison shopping engine or some "bot" or something out there that is searching with this long keyword search but has no interest in looking at the ads.

So I peeled off those long searches and have now put them in as negative keywords. That crazy low CTR had to have been hurting my quality score.

What do you think?

[johninbrooklyn]

Sorry. I think I jumped an explanation here. When I found that we had tons of searches for Adobe Photoshop CS 7 Win/Mac CD-ROM I did the same search. I found that this long search is actually the product page title in Amazon.com.

[AussieWebmaster]

there you go
plus negativing out will get you real people looking to buy software not the book