One of the most challenging components of a successful paid search campaign is having a stong keyword strategy. When it comes to determing when your ads are displayed you don't just pick a certain list of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are used in a search engine. You want to give more specific instructions. You will want to learn about keyword fundementals  before starting.

Prerequisites

You should be familar with the following topics before continuing:

• Setting Up Provider Accounts
• Paid Search Getting Started Guide
• Creating Search Ad Campaigns

Tasks Related to Keywords

• How to create keywords
• How to upload keywords in Bulk
• How to validate keywords
• How to manage keywords
• Understanding keyword status
• How to edit a keyword
• How to add negative keywords 
• How to update landing pages for keywords
• Working in Excel with Keyword Tracking ID's

How to Create Keywords

You can create one or multiple keywords within or across Campaigns:

1. Select Campaigns > Keywords .
2. Click  + Keyword.
3. Select a provider and account from the drop down menus or copy a list of Keywords from Excel with Columns formatted in the required order as indicated on the modal. 
4. Enter the required information in each cell. Required information includes:
• Campaign Name
• Ad Group Name
• Keyword
• URL (you must include the http://www. before your landing page URL)
5. Enter the optional information if desired. Optional information includes:
• Match Type
• Bid
• Status
• If no values are entered, the following default values are applied.
• Match Type - Broad
• Bid - Ad Group Default Bid
• Status - Active

Quick Adding

To save time, you can add multiple Keywords to the same Ad Group by entering the Campaign and Ad Group and first KW on one line and then entering the Keywords as a list on the following lines. This view also includes a directory of your existing Campaign and Ad Groups with the ability to insert Campaing and Ad Grouops into the Keyword grid by clicking on the icon to the left of the Ad Group Name.

For Example:

In this example, Keywords 1, 2 and 3 would go into Example Campaign 1 and  Example Ad Group 1 and Keyword 4 would go into Campaign Example 2 and Ad Group Example 2. For more help troubleshooting errors, click here.

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How to Upload Keywords in Bulk

The Paid Search Module of ChannelAdvisor Complete has the ability to upload a large number of keywords using a bulk upload spreadsheet. ChannelAdvisor provides a template to make the process easy.

To bulk upload keywords:

1. Select Campaigns > Keywords .
2. Select Upload > Keywords .
3. Download the upload template spreadsheet.
4. Populate the spreadsheet with your data. Do not change the header row; the spreadsheet must have four columns labeled Keyword, Base URL, Bid and Category ID .
5. Save the spreadsheet as a text (tab delimited .txt) file with your data.
6. To upload the file:
   • Select the file format using either a tab delimited file that was created using
     MS Excel or another program
   • Browse for the spreadsheet
7. Submit the file.

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How to Validate Keyword Uploads

Use the Event Queue ( Settings > Event Queue ) to determine the data has uploaded successfully.

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How to Manage Keywords

You can view all the keywords in your provider accounts from the Campaign-Keywords view.  

Each search engine has match type identifiers. This is a list for the Google and Yahoo!. The Paid Search Module will prevent users from launching keywords with domains that do not match what we have on file for your account.

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Understanding Keyword Status

All keywords are assigned a status in Paid Search. The status are listed in the table below with the equivalent status on the search engines.

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Managing Keywords Based Performance 

To view performance statistics for your active keywords, navigate to Paid Search- Performance-Performance. From this menu, you can can then either drill into a specific campaign and ad group to see the keywords, or quickly see keywords for a specific provider, campaign, or ad group by using the "Modify Search" or "Filter" button.

• If a keyword is a poor performer, consider changing the match type, ad copy, landing page or position to improve performance.
• Consider pausing a keyword for a period of time if it is out of stock or a poor performer.

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How to Edit a Keyword

To edit a keyword, do one of the following:

1. To change the bid, use the Power Bid tool by going to Optimization > Power Bid . Enter the new bids in the format TrackingID**NewBid
2. To edit the Base URL, click on the Edit button next to a keyword, after navigating to Paid Search-Campaigns-Keywords, or edit Base URLs in bulk by going to Tools > Update Base URLs:
3. To pause or resume keywords, check the box next to the keywords from Paid Search > Campaigns > Keywords and click Pause or Resume.

How to Add Negative Keywords

ChannelAdvisor supports the  use of Campaign and Ad Group negative keywords on Google and Bing. For additional details on this topic see the Working with Negative Keywords page.

1. Select Campaigns > Keywords .
2. Click  + Neg. Keyword.
3. Select a provider and account from the drop down menus or copy a list of Keywords from Excel with Columns formatted in the required order as indicated on the modal. 
4. Enter the required information in each cell. Required information includes
• Campaign Name
• Keyword
5. Enter the optional information if desired. Optional information includes:
• Match Type
• Ad Group
• If no values are entered, the following default values are applied
• Match Type - Exact
• Ad Group - If no value is entered, the negative keyword will be entered as a Campaign Negative Keyword.

Quick Adding

To save time, you can add multiple Negative Keywords to the same Ad Group by entering the Campaign and Ad Group name on one line and then entering the Keywords as a list on the following lines.

For Example:

Any time Ad Group is left blank, the keyword will be added to the campaign level. Any time "all" is used for the Campaign name, the keywords that follow will go into all campaigns. To add to individual Ad Groups within the same campaign, you can fill in the campaign for the first line and leave subsequent lines blank like the last example.

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How to update Landing Pages for Keywords

1.  Identify the keywords that you want to update.
2. From Campaigns > Keywords, download (Export) the keywords you want to update and load into a spreadsheet. .
3. In the spreadsheet, create the new URLs
4. Concatenate them with the Tracking ID, using the ** format.

EXAMPLE:  1234567**http://mysite.com/newurl.html

5. Copy and paste these new URLs (up to 2000 at a time) into the Paid Search module by going to Campaigns > Tools > Update Base URLs

Reference

• Types of Keywords