by mattobrien on January 05, 2012

It’s January and for many paid search advertisers it is one of the busiest months of the year, with increased volumes of searches and budgets phased accordingly.

That said even though it is January and for many a new budget year that isn’t a reason why your marketing spend should need to work any less hard or you should accept greater than usual campaign budget wastage.

One way to make sure that you don’t waste your budget is to make sure you only feature against keywords that are relevant to what you are trying to sell. I know it seems common sense, but there are many that do not adhere to this. A good example of campaigns that could be better targeted can be found if you are searching for one of the less popular, but growing holiday destinations, say Albania. When we looked, out of the top 8 advertisers in paid search for the keyword “Albania holidays” only 4 actually offered either holidays or flights to this destination, the other four didn’t! These included Thomsons, Thomas Cook and First Choice.

You would expect that these ads have appeared due to a board match on the keyword holiday, but if you are going to use broad match it is really important to also use the right negative keywords to stop your ad matching to irrelevant search queries. If you want to use the word “holiday” on broad match, we would recommend adding all the destinations that you don’t serve as negative keywords. It would also be good practice to regularly and in peak season that might mean everyday, mine the search queries to find new negative keywords and stop further irrelevant matches and budget wastage.