Squeezing Traffic From The adCenter Stone – Part 2
To continue on with the first part of this series of posts begun with the basics of choosing keywords to use with an adCenter Search N/W campaign, this post will look at how to further expand keyword lists. One of the problems I consistently run into on adCenter Search is finding targeted keywords for my campaigns that will generate more than only a handful of daily clicks. It actually happens quite often, especially when I’m attempting to build campaigns for ePN items.
As an example, many times I’ll research a product niche and find that it’s doing briskly on eBay.com. It meets the criteria of having a lot of listings and the median final price is above $20. Some people like much higher priced items, but I don’t want to ignore items between $20 and $100 as they have done well commission-wise on ePN. A prime example of such an item is “American Flyer Trains”. Taking a look at the completed listings (need to be logged into your eBay account to view), it shows a healthy number of successfully completed auctions/BIN events.
This is clearly a popular item and like most hobby and collectible categories, enthusiasts are fairly passionate. In many cases, to paraphrase the Lay’s Potato Chip tag line: they can’t buy just one item. I know from experience that they’ll bid on and purchase not only various train cars, but also track and other accessories. This is clearly a hot eBay niche.
The downside is that the MSN adCenter search traffic is extremely low for the targeted keywords to do with “American Flyer” as the estimated search results indicate in the screenshot below:
Actually, “lionel trains” has a much higher search volume. This is where I need to bring up the gambit of going broad on MSN adCenter Search. Actually, much broader than you would consider going on other PPC search engines such as Google AdWords. Before I explain my reasoning for this strategy, let’s go broader still in our keyword search by plugging in “model trains” into the MSN Keyword Research Tool and see what pops up:
We see that search terms such as “model trains” also have a lot more search volume than the longer tail “american flyer trains”. No big surprise there, but let’s go even broader. We also have “model train layouts” and “ho model trains”. I might even include “electric trains”, but this is getting into dangerous territory as there are a lot of very unrelated keyword searches in this group. The same goes for “toy trains”. I really don’t want searchers for “thomas the train” and “fisher price trains”.
The goal with going broader on MSN Search is to get impressions – any impressions at all. This may seem like a desperate act, and in reality, it is. But when dealing with adCenter, it’s either taking a chance on getting a lot of untargeted clicks or going with the certainty of getting virtually no clicks at all. With a good keyword-level tracking system in place, I’ll take my chances with broader keywords on MSN.
I’ll also include a bunch a really long-tail keywords as well that I scrape from the eBay search results, but I also add in some of the broader keywords like the ones identified above. Then I’ll keep an eye on my traffic stats and begin pausing and /or adding negative keywords to my campaigns and ad groups as needed.
In the next round of posts in this series I’ll discuss the match types that I use as well as how I structure my campaigns and configure their settings.
