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We're delighted to share with you our first podcast episode, and we thought we'd start it off with a bang.

In my book, I start the first chapter by talking about the PPC Keyword. Really, I sing its praises.

But the purpose of this podcast, is to look at assumptions, best practices, and philosophies of PPC (especially around the theme of my PPC Ponderings book chapters), and question whether we should still see them the way we did in the past.

In this episode, we look at the evolution of the keyword by interviewing three brilliant guests, and thinking through what the keyword is, how it has changed, and how we should think about its place in PPC moving forward.

You'll be challenged, and possibly a little perturbed at times, but hopefully it will make you think.

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🎙 Episode 1 is finally here! 🎙

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EPISODE 1 GUESTS

• Aaron Levy of Tinuiti
• Amy Bishop of Cultivative Marketing
• Brad Geddes of Adalysis

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EPISODE 1 RESOURCES

• ‍The concerning future of the resilient keyword - Article on Search Engine Land

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👉 Stay Up on Future Episodes By Subscribing Here 👈

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EPISODE 1 TRANSCRIPT

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Chris Reeves:

Welcome to the ZATOWorks PPC Ponderings Podcast, where we discuss the philosophy of PPC and ponder everything related to digital marketing. Our hope is that through these conversations with professionals in the digital marketing space, we can gain a better understanding of what is happening in the digital landscape, and better prepare all us for the future.

Brad Geddes:

The keyword to me is the absolute best targeting method of any advertising in history.

Aaron Levy:

And I think we fell into a lot of that with keywords, that we suppose that people's language and what they were using for search was literal. There's a lot more to it than that.

Amy Bishop:

I feel like we might be headed in a direction where keywords continue to migrate, or evolve, or devolve.

Chris Reeves:

On today's show, we'll be learning all about the almighty keyword, it's past, present, and future. Here to lead our discussion today is the owner of ZATO Marketing, Kirk Williams.

Kirk Williams:

For 23 of the 25 years that the paid search marketing channel has been in existence, the keyword has been nearly synonymous with PPC. Up until recently, when someone said they worked in PPC, it meant they bid on keywords in auctions. Now, for those of you in the space who are unfamiliar with this idea, paid search advertisers select certain words or phrases that people are typing into search engines like Google, or Bing, or Amazon, or saying in this modern smartphone-based world. And they tell the system how much they're willing to pay when a potential customer clicks on their ad in the SERP. Okay, hold up, what's a SERP? A SERP or S-E-R-P, is a search engine results page, but what's more important to understand is that we PPCers love our acronyms.

Amy Bishop:

PPC, KPI, CTR, CPC, CPV, CVR, CPM, CPA, CPL, they all start with C. They all start with C, don't they?

Kirk Williams:

That's Amy Bishop, a great friend and a brilliant PPCer. Amy owns Cultivative Marketing, and is someone you'll hear from again. Back to the keyword, when somebody visits Google, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, etcetera, and type something into the search bar, that's called a search query or a search term. And when applicable it is matched up to specific keywords that advertisers are actively bidding on.

Amy Bishop:

I think a tricky thing about keywords is just that the price continuously goes up, you never see it come down. Originally when Google Ads was created back in the day that it was AdWords, back in the good old days. It used to be one of the big selling points for it was that small businesses could compete equally with big businesses because it wasn't all about cost, it was about quality and relevance. And while those two things are still important at this point, it's also definitely very much about cost. And so sometimes it's just sort of out of reach, certain keywords can be out of reach for specific companies.

Kirk Williams:

To really appreciate what's changing though, let's briefly pause to consider the history of the keyword.

Brad Geddes:

So 1997, Bill Gross out of Idealabs, founded the idea paid search. Essentially he knew people were typing in keywords and he got, I don't know if it was a patent or it was a patent pending whatnot on it.

Kirk Williams:

I recently caught up with my friend, Brad Geddes, to reminisce over his memories of search since Brad's been doing PPC longer than just about anyone I know. And I also just think he's a great storyteller.

Brad Geddes:

That was initially named GoTo.com. And so in, gosh, 1998, when I opened my first paid search account, we actually had to call them, they didn't have an online stuff open. At that point, no one really knew what this was. You had a lot of brand marketers who used to measure impressions. And so they would buy terrible keywords, for the point of if no one clicked they would get impressions. You had a big list of keywords and you could have ads that go to individual keywords, whatever you bid it was a simple auction where you paid a penny more than the person below you, all bids being exposed.

Brad Geddes:

One day, I'm working with a plastic surgeon, and you would often watch how stupid people would bid. And so his competitor came in and his average CPC was $15, which even back then was a pretty pricey CPC. And all these competitors bid 100 bucks, because that was the highest you could go then. And so I'm like, well, you're just being annoying, so I bid $99.99. The next bid being about 15 something dollars. And the doctor called me one day and said, "Brad, I got the weirdest call. I got a call from my competitor who asked us to lower our bid." Because people would call, and he is like, "What's going on?" And I'm like, "Here's the deal, he's paying a $100 to click, you're paying about $15. I could change this or I could let this ride." And he laughed and hung up the phone. And so you had things like bid jamming and gap surfing were bid technique that have just been lost over days.

Kirk Williams:

Brad is who I like to jokingly refer to as the godfather of PPC, but the good kind, not the mafia. He literally wrote the book on PPC with his advanced Google AdWords, first published in 2010. The latest edition still being a must-read for any new PPCer in my opinion, since it includes philosophies and a history of PPC, that's put in way only Brad can put it.

Kirk Williams:

I remember the first time I really got to know Brad in person. We were speaking in London at the first Hero Conf London in 2015, and we grabbed a cab together after our speaker sitting. My wife was with me and I remember this surreal experience of thinking to myself as we sat across from each other in the back of a London cab, I'm in London with my wife sharing a cab with Brad Geddes. It was a bit surreal, and if I remember correctly, I think Brad even paid for the cab. Regardless, here's what Brad remembers about Overture, and the early days of the PPC keyword.

Brad Geddes:

About, oh gosh, maybe a year and a half later, GoTo launched the first bid system. And at first it was 12 bid changes a day. And so you would sit there and watch when people changed their bids and make timestamps, saying, okay, here is when people changed their bids, we're going to bid after this by five minutes. And you could literally graph out when people changed bids. And so this then went on for a while, a little more advanced, but not a whole lot. It turned into Overture, which then turned into Yahoo Panama for your old school people who remember what Yahoo Panama was before they dropped it, and it became just Yahoo paid search.

Kirk Williams:

PPC came of age around the keyword because of its unique targeting capabilities. You could reach a specific individual, asking a specific question, at exactly the time they wanted to learn the answer. If timing is everything, the keyword is the mic drop of marketing.

Brad Geddes:

Now then in 2002, Google initially launched paid search, but it was a CPM based system. And so it was a system really, because everyone was still CPM world, you'd pick a keyword, it was at least $30,000 per quarters on a contract minimum. You'd pick your keywords and you'd just show a banner at the top. And for some words, this was incredibly cheap. Suddenly you're buying CPM and maybe $10,000 a month sounds a lot, but not when you could literally get 100,000 clicks for this because Google didn't know any better. And so then later in the year they launched their self-serve paid search program. And they did two things which really sort of changed the world of paid search. One, they had a better concept of ad groups, which we still think of it's the ad, what's in the ad group describes the ad. The ad is what really matters on that.

Brad Geddes:

And the auction initially, it was click-through rate times cost per click. So click-through rate being, hey, this is how relevant your ad is. If no one clicks on it, you pay more, we're not going to show you. And you had to even maintain minimum CTRs, which meant you could have keywords that were too broad, couldn't get your CTRs, they'd be disabled. That whole auction morphed into quality score, which of course we all know what quality score is today, and they brought the landing page in and just had various iterations over the years. But that was what Google brought to the table. More than anything else was this concept of the ad groups and the CTR or quality score.

Kirk Williams:

When I first started in PPC, working as an in-house marketer in a little e-commerce dropshipping company, I was immediately drawn to the keyword as a targeting method. What could be better than this in marketing? We're able to place monetary value on the exact words that people are communicating to us as to their interests in our products or services. It's just amazing. Here's Brad again, with his thoughts on the keywords value.

Brad Geddes:

The keyword to me is the absolute best targeting method of any advertising in history. It is someone who's sitting down saying, I want to know about this right now. I mean, they're telling you what they want and then you could read out things about who they are, when they want it. I mean, there is no targeting that comes close to this.

Kirk Williams:

There really hasn't been another targeting method that I'm aware of in marketing with this sort of unique trifecta of targeting power before. But well, is there more to it than this? Has the keyword been ascribed too much power by PPCers in love with our unique targeting type?

Aaron Levy:

Look, I mean, I think you and I, Kirk, we've talked a good deal about the keyword and it's diminishing role, diminishing importance, questionable as to how important it wasn't the beginning.

Kirk Williams:

Aaron Levy definitely has concerns about the keyword and he shared them with us. Aaron is the Head of Paid Search at Tinuiti, a huge marketing agency based in the US. And one of the things I love about Aaron is that he's as witty as he is humorous.

Aaron Levy:

For the longest time the keyword was the only lover that we had. It was search, so it was words. We bid on words, we based on words. Words were our only proxy, it's what we had for what a person was looking for. The thing that I really don't like about them and where my thinking has evolved and why I think that you put me on the show is because that it's not the only lever that we have anymore. It's one of dozens, if not hundreds of different levers that we can pull.

Kirk Williams:

In April of 2021, I wrote an article for Search Engine Land entitled, the concerning future of the resilient keyword. In it, I discussed how our understanding of the keyword has changed, but more importantly, the way consumers use search has changed. I'll bring out four things that have changed the nature of the keyword. And those are, number one, Google is a better product than it used to be. To steal from the article, people have been increasingly trained by Google without knowing all the details of their previous behavior being tracked to build that product, to get lazier in their searching. Because Google's results will still be personalized to them.

Kirk Williams:

That's pretty remarkable, and Google has indeed built an impressive search product. Let's say person A is in the market for a mattress and has spent weeks investigating numerous brands online. Researched local mattress shops, and clicked on specific shopping ads to view individual products that they're interested in. Google has all of this data. And the next time they go to Google ready to purchase, they simply type exact match mattress, and Google knows exactly which shopping ads through dynamic remarketing or local stores that they should show to person A. Person B on the other hand is just beginning their shopping experience online, so when they type mattress into Google, Google changes the results to a higher funnel more informational SERP, same keyword, dramatically different results.

Amy Bishop:

I do think that the engines know a lot, they know a lot more than we know. And it's really the context of all of these multiple data points being combined together that really helps define intent. For instance, if you were a tow truck driver and you were trying to advertise to people that were searching about tires or something like that. The fact that they're searching on their phone and potentially calling in would maybe indicate that they could be stranded. Versus somebody that's searching from a computer who may not be in a big hurry, they may just be searching longer-term.

Kirk Williams:

The second thing about the keyword that has changed recently is, number two, Google autocomplete has influenced user behavior. I note in the article that autocomplete really is remarkable in its accuracy, though humorously not at times. And this goes along with a better search product mentioned above. I've even gone to Google at times not knowing exactly what I will type and not really caring that I don't know, since I know Google autocomplete will figure it out. Again, credit to the impressive product Google's built. But autocomplete certainly impacts how people search in bulk.

Kirk Williams:

If Google senses trends and specific phrases and raises those in autocomplete, it stands to reason that act will in itself increase the number of searches done for that exact phrase. Simply because Google is literally showing that to more people, who will then select it. That changes the nature of how people search and the value of certain keywords for bidding within Google Ads.

Aaron Levy:

The direction that Google and Microsoft are going is indicative of the fact that maybe we weren't doing it right. Maybe we weren't exploring everything, we weren't exploring every facet of language, the old adage of, if you do a persona or if you're doing a marketing strategy, are you marketing to the customer or are you marketing for yourself and what you think the customer is. And I think we fell into a lot of that with keywords. That we suppose that people's language and what they were using for search was literal.

Aaron Levy:

There's a lot more to it than that. And so where I think that our discussion will go is that there's a lot more proxies to figure out what people want within search. And so us using the keyword as a start point, I understand why it happens because that's what search has always historically been about. But I don't know why we're looking backwards to look forward. I think what we really have to do is look at all the targeting features that are available and figure out how we can use them to the best of our ability, knowing that yes, keywords are a lever. There's a lot of other buttons, and little twisty knobs, and dials that we could use to try and figure out how to get the right person using the right language.

Kirk Williams:

Number three, mobile device impact. If you remember such declarations as Mobilegeddon a few years ago, there was a shift of Google searches from desktop and mobile. Now this never fully transitioned as proponents of the concept suggested it would, threatened maybe. Simply because there're still a healthy number of people who utilize and will likely for decades to come in my opinion, a desktop computer for things like work and business. Yet mobile devices have an impact on search behavior in part due to practical consideration, such as limited screen size and inefficient touch screen keyboards.

Brad Geddes:

We say mobile conversion rates have gotten worse, it's not for the same words. It is for all your people asking questions of their phones, triggering ads who have zero intent to actually click on an ad and convert, they're asking a general question. And that's where we see a lot of mobile conversion rates plummeting in the past six months.

Kirk Williams:

I might be getting old because typing on an iPhone keyboard makes me want to throw my phone into a blender. I just hate touch screen typing. I'm really bad at it. One data set I've never seen, but would like to is whether the number of words in a search term tends to decrease based on device. I'd be fairly shocked if it didn't due to the aspects I noted above. It's also possible that more word terms tend to be more voice centered while fewer word terms tend to be input via touch screen. All right, and finally then, and especially to remain to any discussion with PPCers these days are on keywords is number four, close variants in Google Ads matching.

Amy Bishop:

Personally, I would say eight times out of 10, my close variants are good matches, they're relevant and I'm happy with them. 20% of the time and specifically on really niche accounts is when we run into issues.

Kirk Williams:

For the unfamiliar listening in, a close variant is a term created by Google to define when the keyword you choose within Google Ads kind of, but not totally matches with the actual search term a consumer types into Google. So keywords are bid on in Google Ads by advertisers and search terms are actually typed into Google by consumers.

Amy Bishop:

And then I would also add to that, I have seen in brand campaigns where competitors start showing up in the search terms as close variants, and that's frustrating. So we add a lot of negatives around that to try to stop that. But specifically in niche accounts, there are times when the queries that come through just are not relevant. That where word order really matters or the specific word used really matters, and I wish I could think of an example off the top of my head, I'm totally blanking on it. But there are times that I wish that we had the option to turn it on or off.

Kirk Williams:

In the old days, if you bid on the exact match type keyword, best mattress for back sleepers, in Google, that means you only would have appeared for search terms exactly matching that phrase and that phrase only.

Brad Geddes:

When Google first launched exact match, it was those exact characters. So you needed every misspelling, every singular, every plural, and every variation to show up. And of course that's a huge amount of work. And we used to have to do keyword research for misspellings. And so then Google launched, I do not remember the year, probably '08-ish or so, could be a little earlier, close variants. Which were essentially, let us take care of plurals, and misspellings, and nothing else.

Kirk Williams:

If you bid on the exact match, best mattress for back sleepers, but someone actually typed into Google, best mittress for back sleepers, Google would now show your ad for that keyword even with those misspellings. That was phase one of close variants, next phase move beyond misspellings and plurals and into intent. And that's where the game started to change pretty drastically. Here's Amy Bishop again, as she gives her thoughts on close variants.

Amy Bishop:

There are times that I wish that we had the option to turn it on or off. Because there are accounts that they just want as much volume as they can get, and by all means, if the close variants are relevant, then we would love to keep those on. Then there are other accounts where it brings in so much junk. And especially during that time period when we couldn't see search terms, it was a real struggle because you know, if this is what you're seeing and it's not good, and you're adding negatives for that, imagine all the things that are coming through that you're not seeing and how bad those things could be.

Amy Bishop:

Thankfully now we have search terms back so we can at least add negatives around those types of things. But in certain accounts, it does seem like they're just a constant, just like a hole in the bucket where we're just leaking spend.

Kirk Williams:

In the next phase of close variants then, things moved into intent. What is the intent of the user searching? Google's claims that they're able to better tell that intent from a variety of data points unavailable to the poor, helpless human advertisers, such as the recent search history of that consumer. Because of that, Google move to also allow match types to appear for words where Google believes the intent mirrors the user intent, not necessarily the keyword intent. Listen to how Aaron Levy puts the shift.

Aaron Levy:

I mean, I think the traditional sense is using the word as a base. A keyword would be like, I want to bid on, use golf clubs, we'll stick with that. In the past, they'll be like, okay, we are going to look at these three words. If it's the exact match, we're only going to use these three words. If it's phrase match, we're only going to use these three words with stuff around them. If it's broad match, we're only going to use these three words and maybe a couple other things sprinkled in.

Aaron Levy:

Whereas now, the sort of modern view is you use the keyword as a thematic start point. So current broad match, use golf clubs, we are looking for people who are interested in buying golf stuff, probably equipment. And they'll probably search for clubs, brands, maybe courses, maybe vacations, which you'll have to clean up with match types or with negatives like that. But it's not looking at those three words. It is looking at what you put in there to build the theme of what you want to go get.

Kirk Williams:

To continue with our mattress example, if you bid on the exact match keyword, best mattress for back sleepers. Now someone typing in, best mattress, could be shown your ad for that keyword, or even just mattress. Since Google may be aware from their previous browsing history or searches of that consumer, or really all those other data points that they have, that that person is in fact a back sleeper and that that query and that keyword would actually match.

Kirk Williams:

Let's pause here, this is a really important point. Overall, the PPC community has responded in frustration to this, tweeting shouts of, keep exact, not exact and similar not always vocalized but no less upset advertisers. In fact, the very day I was preparing this first episode, Google announced their most recent keyword matching change and the PPC world exploded around it. But as much as I find myself at times nodding my head with the frustrations of my fellow PPC advertisers, I also can see the benefit of many of these changes. I find myself a little bit stuck in the middle.

Kirk Williams:

Google does in fact have access to far more data points than we ever can. And it makes sense to give them the ability to make the call at auction time with all of that available information that they have. According to Google, Google Ads Smart Bidding and Smart Creative solutions use machine learning that analyzes millions of signals in real-time to show the right message to the right customer in the moments that matter, that was a direct quote. In theory, this checks out as an idea. Unfortunately what can happen, is that individual advertisers or keyword use cases go horribly wrong. Listen to some of these concerns from Brad Geddes.

Brad Geddes:

Now in some cases, NYC, New York City, I could see where that does have some good things. Part of the problem is when they just make some bad semantic analysis. I mean there were deals, sales, packages mean the same thing in their mind. And so someone who sells tires, rims for cars would put packages to make it easier for consumers, but Google assumes that's a sale, but it might not be a sale. Google has expanded what is the same meaning significantly.

Brad Geddes:

If I say I have a keyword, 'home insurance' exact match. To Google that is, how much should I pay for home insurance? Is the same exact keyword. Except someone saying quote, has a high intent to convert someone who's just saying, what's the average price for something, has no conversion rate intent. And Google's not using machine learning to make those better. I mean, we have a specific keyword which spends close to a million dollars a month. So it's a lot of money on the keyword. The variance of who, what, why, when, how, spend $300,000 a month for this one keyword. Their CPAs are about 400% higher than if they're not included. Google's never figured it out. Now they have the data to which tells us they're not trying to fix it.

Kirk Williams:

So like it or not, this is the way Google has always rolled, right? Google makes big decisions based on the majority of advertisers or users, or maybe just what they want to do, not really caring what happens to the little businesses that don't quite fit their mold. Whether they want to admit it or not, this leads to a natural drop-off from advertisers who are themselves outliers, which means PPC marketing and that of the keyword is just actually not for every single business out there. Surprised to hear that from the mouth of a PPCer? Well, that's the reality we live in, especially with rising auction costs and new small advertisers without the budget to compete with the big guns who have been bidding on those keywords all along. So what do we do with all of this? What is the future of the keyword?

Aaron Levy:

I view everything as pointing towards audiences at this point. We're going to be putting up a blog post on our site in a couple months, depending on when this is released. It's going to talk about fragment intent driven approach. Basically what we're trying to find when we do any kind of marketing is we're trying to find someone who wants your stuff and has money. Whether you make them want your stuff, whether it's traditional search marketing, where they ask you like, "Hey, do you have stuff?" And you're like, "Yep, here's how much it costs." But I view it all as synonymous. They're all proxies to what a person wants.

Amy Bishop:

And I just keep seeing the same theme over and over, and I feel like we might be headed in a direction where keywords continue to migrate, or evolve, or devolve into more of a broad match alone. And then eventually maybe to more of a black box scenario.

Kirk Williams:

Well, far be it for me to prophesy something that may or may not happen, and the last thing any of us want to do is to give Google more ideas for changing up the landscape. But there must be a balance between the changing nature of the auction and the necessary guidelines added by human contributors.

Brad Geddes:

I think there's a step in the middle here, which is where we can feed better data into Google. We have, I mean, a lot of clients who they know better than Google, about their target demographic, and the GOs, and the zip codes, and the time of day, and they're real time bidding us way better than Google for them only, but Google won't take that data. And so I think there's a middle step of us closing a data loop at times, of saying, hey, we're doing predictive bidding for some people. So if we're going to do predictive conversion rate bid-based systems, and not just react to things, we can technically bid better than Google right now. But if Google could take that, they're better at machine learning than we are by far, but they won't take the inputs. So I think we have another step still which is better data integration across systems.

Kirk Williams:

While advertisers need to adapt to a changing landscape, Google needs to ensure they don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Human guided automation is still the path to success and the keyword is no different, even if it is changing. I'm Kirk Williams and may the auctions be ever in your favor.

Chris Reeves:

(singing)

Chris Reeves:

This has been the PPC Ponderings Podcast. Join us next time as we dive into attribution, is the way you are thinking about digital marketing attribution completely wrong? This one is going to be a doozy. We might even have to split it into two episodes, so you won't want to miss it. In the meantime, while we're getting that episode ready, we'll be releasing the full interviews from this week's three guest's bonus episodes. Kirk, Amy, Brad, and Aaron all spent a lot of time discussing the keyword in more detail than we were able to include today, so you want to check it out.

Chris Reeves:

This podcast was produced by me, Chris Reeves. Kirk Williams was the assistant to the producer, interviewer, writer and narrator. Special thanks to our guest interviewees, Aaron Levy, Amy Bishop and Brad Geddes. This podcast was recorded in the ZATO Works Publishing Studio in Billings, Montana. ZATO Works Publishing is a subsidiary of ZATO, a paid search agency focused on e-commerce brands owned by Kirk Williams. We look forward to seeing you again next time.

Chris Reeves:

(singing)

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