Ensure Your AdWords Search Traffic is CLEAN

One of the quickest, fastest, and best ways to optimize an AdWords account initially is to look at the search terms report and update the negatives. At ParaCore we have a very specific process for this. When we launch a new campaign, we actually look at negatives 10 days in a row every single day. And we do the same thing when we take over an account and we’re looking at search terms for an existing account setup.

Now a search terms report can sometimes be long and the process can be a little bit tenuous. And, especially if you have an account manager and or maybe an analyst working on the same account, sometimes its difficult to coordinate those efforts and distribute the workload appropriately. So in today’s video I’m gonna talk to you about how ParaCore, how we actually manage the, what we call, negative cleansing on a regular basis and how we optimize accounts through search terms analysis and then cleaning those accounts up.

So, as I mentioned, once we take over an account, we actually look at negatives every single day for 10 days and then, at the end of 10 days, we decide what that’s gonna look like moving forward. Sometimes, if it’s an incredibly, what we call, dirty account where there are a lotta search terms that aren’t relevant to the client’s business, we might keep it daily or roll it into three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

But if we find that it’s kind of a normal account, then we actually roll it into weekly and weekly is pretty much standard for almost all of our accounts, at least for three to maybe six months. After six months, some of those accounts roll into bi-weekly or monthly if they’re really clean because, quite honestly, it just doesn’t need it every single week. You might find one or two or three search terms that aren’t good and we don’t need to go through the entire process of doing the search terms every week. So that’s our timeline process in how we handle new accounts, accounts that are in kind of standard cleansing, which is weekly, and then accounts that are in a little bit more of a maintenance mode, which could be, which is typically bi-weekly but could be as long as a month. All right, so every single week…

ParaCore’s structured with account managers and then account analyst. And analysts and account managers are assigned to accounts. So an account manager has their book of accounts, and an analyst has their book of accounts. Sometimes an analyst works with multiple account managers and an account manager works with multiple analysts. So that structure can be a little bit complicated when you’re trying to coordinate all of these different search terms reports and keep them, you know, in a process that’s easy to understand for everybody.

So within Asana, which is our project management tool, we have a list of all of our clients and when negatives are due. Now if I’m an analyst, I’m gonna go into AdWords and I’m gonna basically pull a search terms report for a specific date range. In this example, the date range is May second until May 15th, so seven days. And I pulled all the search terms out of there and I basically only used a limited number of columns. I have the search term and then the suggested negative is empty, I’ll talk about that in a second, the approved is empty, the list is empty. So really just the search term. And actually, just recently, I think this week, we’re gonna start adding the ad group and then also the match type so if there are certain search terms that are really triggering an ad group a lot and spending where it shouldn’t, we’re gonna be able to see those. But that literally just rolled out this week. This has been working well for a while.

So the analyst exports all the search terms, they then add this to Google Docs. Every single account is, every single search terms report is titled exactly in this manner, there’s no variations so we can find them very quickly. They’re all saved in one folder. So when we go through this process, we can actually go back to all these search terms reports, look at the suggested negative, the approved negative, and if an account starts performing poorly or having an issue at some point, we can actually go back to the search terms report for that time period, see the search terms, the suggested negative, the approved negative, then maybe identify why a certain negative was added and what the context of that negative was. Because when you’re looking at a negatives list and you see all these negatives and you see some, like, broad word like rogers, for example, you don’t know why rogers was used. And when words get more generic, it’s even more difficult. So by having these search terms report saved every single month, it adds an incredible amount of value if we need to go back and audit an account that maybe starts performing poorly for some reason or something changes, you know. It could be a market fluctuation but it could be a negative that we added, and so we need to make sure about that. All right, so, those are some of the benefits of actually having this type of setup.

Now the way this works is, the analyst exports all the search terms, they upload them to this Google Drive sheet, and then they go through all of them and they suggest negatives. And so, typically depending on the analyst at ParaCore, they’re either newer-ish and, you know, they’re kinda getting their head around negatives, or they might be more experienced and it’s just their role to do more analysis on the accounts. So they will actually suggest a negative. If there’s something that they feel is strange or they just wanna point something out like hey, this is a location and that’s not immediately apparent, they will drop that in comments, so this is Mario’s, he might drop that in the comments and then when he’s done with the entire sheet, he will then assign that to Bekah in Asana and basically saying hey, this is ready, provide a link to the document. Becca jumps in and then looks at the search terms, the suggested negative, and then the approved negative. Excuse me, then the suggested negative, and then she approves the negatives and decides which ones are good. So in this case, she approved all of Mario’s negatives but she also added a few that she felt were, would be valuable to include in the negatives list in AdWord. And we only use lists pretty much, we don’t really add negatives to campaigns or ad groups for the most part. And so she will then approve a negative. She will then also add a comment if she has an additional comment, like hey, just a reminder we are doing, we’re doing competitor names as negatives, we’re not including them in the search terms, or something like that.

Mario also will put what list that this negative is gonna be in. So we have competitor list, we have geographic list, we have list based on products and categories and things like that. So our list management is really important so he’s saying hey, Arizona Rivers is a pool service company, I want it to be in the competitor list, you know, and do you approve it, and then Becca will say yes. It’s also worth mentioning that for all of our clients we actually have a Google Doc that talks about the different, the different parameters or rules around negatives. So for some clients we include competitors, for some clients we don’t. For some clients their list of services is maybe not a hundred percent intuitive, so let’s say we have an electrician that doesn’t do outdoor lighting, so we’ll put that in there. So there’s actually a document, a reference point, where people can go to the document and determine if certain things should be negative. So we have a new analyst come on, or an account changes hands, then there’s one single point of information that we use for negatives.

Okay, so Bekah then reviews this and she says, “You know “what, this is looking good. “I added a couple things. I feel good about this.” She then assigns this back to Mario in Asana and what Mario then can do is he can go in here and he can click this top one and then highlight all these and just copy, and then once he’s copied all those, he can take it right over to AdWords and just paste it into the list and save. And so him moving it into AdWords is very, very quick. So this intermediate step of using the Google document is really helpful because it creates basically an environment for Bekah to work with Mario on the different negatives and then also creates an audit log so if something goes wrong we can say, hey, what was the context of adding that negative, is that negative good or bad, you know, should we have pulled that out, what traffic did that maybe affect or not affect. And then it also makes it very, very, very easy for Mario to copy and paste and actually add to the campaign. This typically… Typically we do this a week at a time so there’s a lag of maybe, I don’t know, from the very first day, a lag of maybe seven to 10 days on certain search terms, so that’s why we do it every single day for the first 10 days of a new account and then assess how often we should do it from there.

So that’s how we at ParaCore… It’s one of the best ways to optimize an account right away is through search terms and negatives and basically cleaning the traffic, and this process has been working out really well for us. I would love to have this in like an automated system where it was just a little bit easier and it was more like a SAS product but I haven’t find one, I dunno, maybe there’s one out there and I just haven’t seen it. So if there is, please comment, let me know. But this has worked out really well. So thanks for watching, if you have any questions, please leave a comment below. If you like the video, like it. If you wanna see more, subscribe. And thank you for watching.

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