Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Multiple Websites One Account Keyword Conflicts

Posted by steven.alker on 9/3/2010 at 10:38 AM ET 1100 Points
Hi everyone, nice to be back. I’ll post two questions to cover this new client as the issues are slightly different. I am offering 1000 points for this one because it is a much clouded area concerning AdWords.

My client is a successful marketing product provider based in the UK and selling to the USA, Europe and of course the UK. His websites are good but in need of refreshing but we will attend to that in a month or so. For various reasons our problem centres around the use of Google AdWords and the Google rules governing the effects of having the same keyword which we want to apply to different sites and different campaigns. I have revised his AdWord account structure to give it a decent structure and now, the goal is to make it stop competing against itself!

The problem is that certain Keywords define the product in many languages and across many applications, so for example, his product W Card (Names have been changed) is known generically as a W Card in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Italy and The USA. His brand might be the Zig-Zag card and it is becoming well known, but the Marketing and Print industry refer to all products of this kind as W Cards. Rather like most vacuum cleaners are generically called Hoovers.

He has 7 independent websites, hosted regionally to maximize local promotional opportunities, so for want of a better description, he owns w-card.com, w-card.co.uk, w-card.it, w-card.fr, w-card.de, w-card.es, w-card.se and z-shed.co.uk

We have lovely AdWords for each country which define the product by what it is in their own language and since I have set them up, his ads are popping up for the first time ever, included related searches for similarly styled competitors.

The problem is with the search terms W Card, Wcard, W-Card and so on.

When used on Google Espania, they should trigger his Spanish language advert, but according to the newer Google rules, it would seem that the Keyword W card and variants will compete against each other from one campaign to another, even though the destination URL’s will be different (w-card.it rather than wcard.co.uk in Italy for example)

How do I overcome this? Google won’t let him have two AdWord accounts, so the current structure is like this.

Account:
Campaign UK
AdGroups UK Horizontal, product specific and Application specific ads
Ads UK x 5
Keywords UK relevant to the AdGroup above plus w-card

Campaign Fr
AdGroups Fr, Horizontal, product specific, application specific
Ads Fr x 5
Keywords Fr, relevant to the AdGroups but in FRENCH! But we also want w-card

And so on for all countries

Does this mean that the Keyword W-Card in the UK Campaign with its destination of W-Card.co.uk is going to play merry hell with the Keyword W-Card in France where the destination URK is W-Card.fr?

Having the sites hosted and back linked locally has made the organic listings blow through the roof (me again) but it would seem that it is causing a headache on AdWord duplication and interference of AdWords within the Google Rules.

How on earth do we get round this or am I totally mistaken?

I’m offering 1000 points for this because it will necessitate you reading the question twice and the answer looks to be difficult. Please invite any web pals to pile in – all help will be appreciated.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 9/3/2010 at 9:26 PM Accepted
    Dear Stevea,

    I've consulted with my spies at Google and after considerable
    arm twisting and threats of bodily harm I have a fix for you
    that just might solve your problem.

    In certain cases, where a Google PPC buyer needs more than 20 or so AdWords campaigns to advertise their products or services, it's sometimes possible to create multiple accounts and then link them together using something called a My Client Center (MCC).

    MCC is what Google calls "a powerful tool for handling multiple AdWords accounts". Here's a link to get you signed up.

    https://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/myclientcenter/

    I hope this helps. Good luck to you, and let me know how you
    go on. Have a great weekend.

    Gary Bloomer
    The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
    Wilmington, DE, USA

    P.S. I was kidding about the threats and bodily harm.
  • Posted on 9/4/2010 at 9:44 PM Accepted
    Great work on the arm wringing Gary . I wish I had you on my side for my Google complaints :). If I understood the question correctly what you have is a "beautiful dilemma" I would not mind paying a pretty penny (in a perfect world where click fraud doesn't exist) to have my sites ranking 1-3 on the top PPC results for my keywords. I guess it is more a resource limitation problem than anything else as PPC cost can get crazy . What I would do is to limit where the ads are shown by geo-location like w-card UK only shows up for users in the UK. These are accessible through your adwords dashboard. Also look into using negative keywords to limit where you do not want your sites to show. I hope this advice was helpful and provided some insight on your question.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 9/9/2010 at 3:24 AM Author
    Thanks for all the responses so far - I realised that this was a difficult one because the information needed to answer it changes every day (Google) and that Google's rules and logic at leat appear to be non commutative - eg if you do a broad search on a term and get 123,000 how come an exact search renders 198,000 items?

    If you can't belive the basic sums, how do we interpret the highter maths!

    I'll respond in detail to Gary, webmaster and dvogel as soon as I get out of the jurasdiction of the dictatorship which won't let Blackberry operate in case somone says something rude about the Ruler's dog!

    Steve Alker
  • Posted by steven.alker on 9/9/2010 at 3:30 AM Author
    Just realised that by adding the three answers together I might just have the start of a solution - apply to manage multiple key-words - target geography, target campaign, and have ad-word and thus geography limited specific URL's as landing pages on utterly different web sites and website paths - they client has 8 websites, so that's enough top level URL's to start differentiating things.

    The product keywords will all go to a product specific page.

    Great start guys!!
  • Posted by steven.alker on 9/27/2010 at 11:35 AM Author
    Sorry for not getting back to close this and thanks for doing it for me Carrie. I got the answers I was looking for and then got very distracted. Thanks again to all the respondants.
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