How to find Good Keywords From your Own Tracking - using the OOOFF Tracking system

As you probably know one of the best places to find keywords for you campaigns is in you own logs or tracking. And the most up to date info is tracking the people come to your site via search queries. Now you can track these in your your logs or a click tracking system like the one I’ve been laying out on here. One strategy I like to use, on Adwords for doing keyword research is to bid on single word terms. However to do this you don’t want to use your main account. I’d suggest setting up a new junk account and dumping in all the single words you can like “car” or “house” using phrase match and exact match. Then bid a decent amount so you make it up to the first page. These keywords aren’t that hard to get for fairly cheap as it’s hard to maintain a good CTR and not get QS’d out. Then run it as long as they let you until you get Quality Score screwed. Then go through your logs and pull all the queries out and look for themes and ideas of stuff that might bring traffic. Real search data is gold compared to those crappy keyword tools like spyfu or keywordspy.

For those of you using my click tracking script I’m going to share the code for scraping out the queries from google. With this you can pull the keywords that converted or any keywords from any click that came to your site. If you want conversions just add a http://www.domain.com/queryscript.php?type=conv

<?

dbconnect();

$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT(clicks.referer) FROM clicks, conversions WHERE ";
if($_GET['type'] == 'conv'){
$sql .= "clicks.id = conversions.click_id AND ";
}
$sql .= "
clicks.source = 'ggl'
AND clicks.country = 'uk'
AND clicks.referer LIKE '%christmas%'
AND clicks.matchtype = 'e'
ORDER BY clicks.id DESC";

$q = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
$myarray = array();
while ($ref = mysql_fetch_assoc($q))
{
$ref = explode("?",$ref['referer']);
parse_str($ref[1],$output);
if(isset($output['q']))
{
$qstr = strtolower($output['q']);
}elseif (isset($output['p'])){
$qstr = $output['p'];
}

 if(isset($qstr))
{
$ex = array_key_exists($qstr,$myarray);
if($ex)
{
$myarray[$qstr] = $myarray[$qstr] + 1;
}else{
$myarray[$qstr] = 1;
}
}
unset($qstr);
}

sort($myarray);
foreach($myarray as $keyw=>$value){
//echo "$keyw"; this is if you just want the query for cutting and pasting
echo "$keyw,$value"; // this is if you want the keyword with the count of the number of queries it showed in.
}
?>

This is pretty crude and ripped right from my own system. But it’ll pull the keywords from the queries in the referers from Google.

Take these queries and dump them into their own campaign with exact match and phrase match only. No Broad match. And then watch what happens and make you’re adjustments from there. In another month do it again. You’ll come up with all kinds of good words you never would have thought of on your own.