Here’s a comment received this week from an A1WebStats user who has an Adwords campaign they created, with many phrases set up as broad match …

“I have gone through the list in detail.  It’s an eye-opener and it’s obvious that there is a lot of waste here.  I’m appalled at the current situation.”

Most people who use Google Adwords will take a simplistic view of clicks gained.  The Adwords system will show something like:

Keyword                            Clicks

Sailing courses                   95

Learn to sail                        52

… and the website owner wonders why they’re not getting enough enquiries.

After all, if Google says that there have been clicks for those phrases then surely more of those people should have got in contact?

The reality is that Google Adwords set up as broad match (i.e. what the system defaults to) is a recipe for disaster.   As an example, when someone searched for ‘sailing to Australia from uk’, Google showed the advert related to the phrase ‘sailing courses’ (and the person clicked).   Here’s the evidence from A1WebStats below …

What’s happened here is that Google has seen the searcher phrase of ‘sailing to Australia from uk’ and has thought that it’s related to a keyword phrase of ‘sailing courses’.  Yes, there’s a tenuous link but not a strong enough link to warrant showing the advert and gaining a rubbish click.

We can 100% guarantee that if a company is using broad match phrases in Google Adwords then they will be getting numerous wasted clicks but just weren’t aware of it because the Google system doesn’t exactly shout out “actually, you had some clicks from people who typed something that wasn’t closely aligned to what your keyword phrases are”.

And that’s one of the beautiful things about A1WebStats because any company can pick out all website visitors who came in via Google Adwords and it’ll show them the actual phrases that resulted in clicks on their adverts.  The clever users of the system do it all within their 30 days free trial, perhaps thinking that they won’t pay for it thereafter.  They soon realise though that the cost vs what it can help them with, including identifying Adwords wastage ongoing, is a no-brainer.