Google says No to niche phrases

October 24, 2008 Google Adwords 2 Comments

Any company that has niche product names, under which they want to appear within Google has a couple of options:

1. Get good positioning in the natural search rankings

2. Use PPC

Although it’s often the case that niche phrases do result in companies getting good natural rankings for their products, that positioning isn’t always as strong as it could be, and sometimes doesn’t happen at all.  Therefore, the company wants to use PPC to ensure that whenever people type their niche phrases, people will see a link to their website.

You’d think this is easy to achieve in PPC but it’s not, as the following example shows …

A client has a range of makeup products, each of which has unique names.  One of those products is called i-smoulder.  We set up a PPC campaign focusing on variations of that phrase, assumed that we could gain cheap clicks and strong positioning (because no-one else would be optimising for that phrase) and we then found that the Google system refused to make the advert visible when that phrase was typed.

There was a strong link between the phrase, the PPC advert text, and the website landing page itself.  All boxes ticked as far as Google should be concerned.  Upon asking Google why the advert wasn’t being allowed to show the answer was that the quality score for the phrase was low because the traffic was low, which basically means that not enough people were searching for the product.

In a way that’s understandable but the reality is that the product wouldn’t be searched on huge numbers of times.  However, as other forms of PR kick in, it’ll become searched for more and so people should be able to see the advert.  Even then, why, as an advertiser, shouldn’t an advert appear when people DO type ‘i-smoulder’?  It’s not as if the appearance of the advert in the Sponsored Links is taking up advert space.

Then Google said that it would be possible to use phrases such as ‘i-smoulder eye pencil’ but have them set up as broad match.  This is another way of saying “use that phrase and your advert will display when people type ‘eye pencil’ along with other phrases that aren’t necessarily i-smoulder but the Google system deems that there’s a relevance between the search phrase used and your product”.  

From many years of experience, broad match in Google is a generator of poor quality traffic and therefore wasted clicks.  What Google are doing, therefore, is stopping companies using niche phrases because “the system doesn’t think people will type those phrases so we don’t think they should be allowed”, but at the same time are saying “you can adapt the phrase and use broad match to make it visible”.

So, ‘i-smoulder’ on its own isn’t allowed but ‘i-smoulder eye pencil’, as an even more specific, but broad-matched phrase, is allowed.   People often comment to me that I’m very negative about Google - this is just one example of why that is - forcing advertisers down certain paths that won’t benefit them as much as the original path they wanted to take.