Stop Internal Keyword Competition in Google AdWords Campaign

In this challenging new economy, you need to work hard for getting the slightest of advantages over your competitors. Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to increase their market value and project their services and products superior to all of a customer's other choices. Of all the marketing strategies that are in place today, one of the most effective has to do with digital marketing.

When almost everyone seems to be making good use of the World Wide Web, businesses have to strive to have a strong digital marketing presence. This includes having websites and social media sites, to name a few. In the coming years, the number of people on the World Wide Web would surely increase as more are learning about the positive benefits that digital marketing brings.

Obviously, they use several effective digital marketing tactics such as paid search campaigns to outclass their arch-rivals and maintain steady popularity in the online commercial arena. Different AdWords campaigns help businesses to harness the power of this strong platform and fully realize the untapped potential of digital advertising.

Just as paid campaigns can become a potent online marketing tool for your business, they come with lots of twists and unkind surprises. Fallacious use of paid search can only drain money out of your pocket without giving any substantial results. There is a great possibility you might become your own competitor and vie with your own marketing plan unknowingly.

Sometimes, however,  it is not your opponents who are doing well, but you are following wrong promotional ways and handed them the precious competitive edge. Internal competition within an AdWords account is one of the most common online marketing mistakes while running a PPC ad campaign.

1. How Important Is The Use Of Keywords?

That said, whatever form of digital marketing or advertising your business decides to use, going even deeper into each is the use of keywords. These generally comprise a part of your advertising content. Then, these keywords refer to the evergreen words constantly at use whenever an Internet user keys in a search. But, even within a specific form of strategy, businesses are also facing the problem of which keywords will work best to achieve their content goals.

It is a scenario where businesses wrestle against their own keywords and the chances are higher that they may be dommed due to unnecessarily high bids.

2. Know what exactly Internal Keyword Competition is?

Internal keyword competition occurs when two or more ad campaigns of a particular website vie for the same search term in the Google AdWords account. Simply it means you are targeting multiple Google Adwords campaigns with the same keywords. You may not know it, but perhaps you’re competing against your own rankings, because of the wrong use of keywords. In most cases, this happens when you have little knowledge with the use of keywords, or that you were simply negligent.

Using single keywords for several campaigns, intentionally or unintentionally you are duplicating your own set of keywords. Sharing the same exact syntax and match type, duplicate keywords compete against each other and target the same location, language, time and device settings of your audience.

The consequence is, Google fails to determine which page it will display for the given search term. As this can cause higher cost per click, internal keyword competition can jeopardize your entire marketing effort. In looking at the entire picture, rather than helping your site land higher, your website is falling even lower as to SEO and search rankings. To put it straightforwardly, you’re failing in your marketing campaign.

Take a look at the examples

i. Between keywords under different match types-

Suppose your keyword is pearl earrings, by default it is a broad match keyword. If you have set this keyword under phrase match “pearl earrings” and under exact match [pearl earrings], these three keywords would compete internally. When a user is searching for pearl earrings, all three keywords will try to trigger ads.

ii. Long tail variations of keywords-

Internal competition may arise even if you use long tail variations of your root keyword such as best pearl earrings for women, affordable pearl earrings or affordable women pearl earrings.

When a user searches for best pearl earrings for women, the keywords that can trigger the ads will be [best pearl earrings for women] exact match keyword as well as phrase match keyword such as “pearl earrings for women” and “pearl earrings”.

3. How Internal Keyword Competition harms the performance of your ad

Internal keyword competition is harmful to the performance of your ad. In general, rather than making your ad succeed, it only pulls it even lower. Visit Google Ads help for you to learn how to better manage your ad campaigns, in whatever form of digital marketing. In so doing, you’ll also have better insights on keyword competition.

Here are some of the ways that keyword competition is harmful to your ad:

i. Increased CPCs-

As you are bidding, competing and contesting against your own set of keywords for achieving highest ad rank, it will increase the amount you are spending on CPCs.

ii. Creates confusions among AdWords campaign managers-

The biggest negative impact of internal keyword competition is that it can create confusion among the AdWords campaign managers. They might think, in spite of doing everything correctly, their campaigns are not giving the desired results.

Driven by the misleading data, either they pump in more money on an erroneous campaign or stop running a campaign that has a huge potential for giving valuable results.

In both ways, you are missing out the chance of effectively using AdWords for a solid advertising of your business.

iii. Mixed messaging and inferior customer experience-

If you are introducing messaging variants, internal keyword competition can cause serious issues as it makes the individual pages to compete against each other for the keyword in the search engines, just as they compete with other websites.

Advertisers completely lose control over the ads they want to display to the potential clients. The obvious result is poor user experience and convoluted messaging.

4. How you can combat Internal Keyword Competition

According to the Google AdWords experts, running an ad campaign with internal keyword competition is quite common, however, the positive sign is, it only pinches your pocket if you are running the faulty campaign for too long.

You can redeem yourself by identifying and eliminating the errors and taking right measures at the right time. It is never too late to stop internal keyword competition for an ad campaign. With the right steps, you can render your account to be more effective in terms of marketing rankings.

That said, here are few ways you can follow to fix the problem:

i. Target each keyword on only one page of the site-

As you have already got an idea by reading this far, the internal competition arises when you are targeting the same keyword on multiple pages. So it is always a clever tactic to target each keyword on only one page of the site.

ii. Remove Duplicate Keywords in AdWords-

Identifying and expelling duplicate keywords would be the first on your list to streamline your Google AdWords PPC campaign.

The process of removing duplicate keywords using AdWords Editor & AdWords Interface.

iii. Removing Duplicate Keywords from AdWords Editor

Step 1: Go to AdWords Editor

Step 2: Select Tools > Find Duplicate Keywords

Step 3: Select the criteria for finding duplicate keywords and hit the Find duplicate keywords button

Step 4: The following page will show the list of duplicate keywords picked up basis the criteria selected.

Step 5: Figure out the duplicate keywords basis the metric you want and take the appropriate steps for the keywords that you are not willing to display for your ad.

iv. Removing Duplicate Keywords from AdWords Interface

Duplicate keywords refer to a bid for the exact same keyword with the exact match type in a single search campaign. Duplicate keywords can commonly happen, especially when there are multiple managers that are working on one website or content account. Often, it would be difficult to track which keywords are still in use and which aren’t.

That said, here are steps to remove duplicate keywords:

Step 1: Go to Keywords Tab directly

Step 2: Sort the keywords list by name or match type to find keywords alphabetically or through the keyword match types. You can manually enter the keyword for which you wish to search the duplicates, in the search box that says ‘Find Keywords’

v. Add Negative Keywords-

Another useful way to combat internal keyword competition is integrating negative keywords. By utilizing phrase as a negative in broad match modifier ad group, you can comprehensively restrain competition between broad match and phrase modifier. And exact as a negative in phrase ad group curbs the competition between the exact and phrase.

The best way to incorporate negative keywords is to use it in the short tail keyword groups to avoid internal keyword competition.

Final Thoughts:

You may lose any realistic chance of reaching the top by taking a single wrong step. It is highly essential that you should check and recheck your Google AdWords PPC campaigns to ensure they are giving you the full value of your investment on advertising.

Even with the smallest details, such as keywords, it’s not unusual for businesses to struggle even internally as to which are the proper keywords to use for their business. Keywords, after all, form an excellent part of SEO and marketing, which can improve the advertising campaigns of businesses.

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