Don't Let Machines Write Your Keyword Lists

As anyone who has seen the Terminator or Matrix movies can attest, if machines rule the world humans are in deep trouble. Similarly, if you allow machines to control the PPC keyword creation process you are guaranteed to both leave opportunity on the table and flush money down the toilet.

The reason is simple: language is really hard. The best language software in the world, Google's, is awful with language. My last SEL post related to bid management in PPC; the AdSense ad running next to it was for a contracting firm looking to bid on construction projects.

Consider the following:

Example 1: Playboy Classic Cigarette Girl Adult Women's Costume

A smart human would tread carefully here. A dumb robot would throw out some fairly eye-opening keywords. Now, in the real world someone would catch this, right? Maybe. In fact, we found that for this retailer an agency using robotic keyword construction was running the keyword "Playboy" as a search term landing on this page and ran the same keyword on content match!

Example 2: Mountain House Beef Stew

Now, the smart analyst realizes that this is backpacking food and will attach the appropriate modifiers whether or not those words appear on the page. The robot? Not so much.

Machines will also put together words that don't make any sense as keywords, and carve up phrases that should not be separated. Some example of the nonsense we've seen from "world class keyword generating tools": "nnn", "33", "longsleeve", "clothes", "women", and many more. The retailer for whom these were built sells sporting goods. These lists not only came with landing pages, but bid suggestions, too!

Granted, for websites with 20,000 products, smart humans can't keep up with keyword construction manually. However they can use tools that allow humans to control the process in a way that both prevents wasteful spending and capitalizes on the analyst's understanding of industry jargon, appropriate synonyms, common misspellings and likely abbreviations to build a much more robust list.

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