During Google’s ad auctions, you and your competitors often compete for ad position. In order to improve their ad placement, most advertisers look outward at their competition and try to beat them by optimizing their bids, improving the quality of their ads and landing pages, and optimizing their ad extensions. However, an important area that many advertisers miss is within their own AdWords campaigns: they suffer from internal keyword competition!
What Is Internal Keyword Competition?
Internal keyword competition occurs when you have two or more keywords that target the same audience and are identical. This typically occurs when the same keywords appear in different campaigns or in two or more ad groups within the same campaign. Internal keyword competition also poses a problem to advertisers managing multiple AdWords accounts. Advertisers in these situations can compete amongst each other – driving up their CPCs.
Since you cannot have two or more keywords enter the same auction, AdWords must decide which of the two duplicate keywords are most relevant to the search. If the keywords are the same, AdWords looks at different factors to determine which ad is served.
How Does This Impact Your Performance?
Increased CPCs
Max CPC Bid is one of the factors that AdWords analyzes. If the only differentiating factor between two ads is their max CPC bid, then the ad with the higher Max CPC bid will be served.
For example:
Mixed MessagingThe $1.00 Max CPC Bid would usually be enough for the ad to enter the auction; however, because the advertiser has created internal competition, the ad with the higher Max CPC Bid is selected.
Internal competition can also create mixed messaging and poor user experiences. In this example, the keywords have an identical bid but now the landing pages vary.
The ad with the higher Ad Rank is selected. With this keyword, the advertiser wants to target users who are interested in paying for site-retargeting strategies. These users would find more interest in their www.propellant.media/our-strategies page where this information is listed; however, the second URL is served, which mixes the message that the advertiser wants to convey.
How to Find Duplicate Keywords & Remove Them
To resolve this issue, Google AdWords Editor offers a solution. Within your account, go to the “Find duplicate keywords” tool.
Then, select the campaign(s) and ad group(s) you want to evaluate. Word Order should be “strict word order.” Select “duplicates must have the same match type” setting. Then, set the location of duplicates as “across selected campaigns.”
Once “Find Duplicate Keywords” is selected, a list of all the duplicate keywords is shown. This allows you to remove or pause any duplicates as you see fit.