Adwords Keyword Flipping
10. Dec 2007 | 11 Comments

I hope you’ve all been busy creating your Ebay Affiliate Websites because I’m currently working on a Subscription based Promotional Tool to help you get Indexed & Rank faster. More details will be revealed soon so keep checking
This quick tutorial is on Keyword Flipping.
What is Keyword Flipping?
Keyword Flipping is perfect for Affiliate Marketers & also people running Multiple PPC campaigns at once. It allows you to set up Campaigns quicker, analyse your results quicker then make the necessary optmisation tweaks to increase your CTR once you know what’s already working. This technique saves you time, lots of time.
Overview
As the Affiliate Marketing space becomes more & more saturated it’s important to test as many different offers (with multiple variables) as we can. Naturally it can be a time consuming process setting up very very targeted PPC campaigns without first knowing which keywords are going to perform best for us in the long run. Keyword Flipping basically allows you to test lots of targeted keywords at once then pick the initial performers out & create a more targeted adgroup. Thus further increasing the CTR & reducing the cost we pay per click.
Theory
It’s important to understand the Adwords Bidding Formula to really see why having a higher CTR & keeping things targeted is important:
Ad Score = CTR x Max Bid
Therefore if my overall CTR is 10% & I’m bidding 1 Dollar then my Ad Score is 10. However, if someone else has a CTR of 20% & they’re bidding $0.75 then their Ad Score is 15 therefore outranking my ad (even though they’re bidding less).
This is why people generally bid higher to start, get a decent CTR & tweak adcopy then reduce the bid whilst monitoring position & CTR to get more value per click.
Our aim is to get the highest possible CTR on the ads that are working for us. This allows us to attain this best possible return on our advertising spend. We could make very targeted adgroups & ads for each individual keyword but this takes up time & less time means we can test less offers.
How it Works
When you’re setting up a brand new campaign for a specific offer try to theme your keywords & put them in groups. Let say for example that we’re talking about Web Hosting. You might choose the following keywords:
- Cheap Web Hosting
- Affordable Web Hosting
- Discount Web Hosting
- Low Cost Web Hosting
- Web Hosting Coupons
- Cheapest Web Hosting
- Lowest Priced Web Hosting
- Cheap Web Hosts
In this group these keywords are themed by price. They all relate to one another fairly well so I can get away with either using Google’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion or Just creating some generic Low Cost Adcopy for them, then I’ll bid to position 4 or Above.

I’ll normally let the ads then run for around 24-48 hours. Once that period has elapsed I’ll go back to the group & check the stats. You will soon be able to see which ads are getting a good number of impressions & clicks. It’s also important to track the conversions on a keyword level, otherwise you won’t know which keywords are converting.
Flipping the keyword now involves grabbing the best performers & creating their own highly targeted adgroup (those that are converting & getting a decent amount of impressions). Say for example that Cheap Web Hosting had the highest CTR of about 8% & converted at 4%. We can then create a new adgroup called “Cheap Web Hosting” that contains that keyword only. We now create a much more targeted ad, such as:

You can see how we use the keyword in the Adcopy 3 times now. As people search for the keyword it highlights the text, thus highlighting their attention to the ad:

Doing this can sometimes double or triple your CTR which means you can hold a much higher position at a fraction of the price. This means that if we still convert at 4% on the keyword we can pull in the same amount of traffic at half the price thus doubling our ROI.
Conclusion
Keyword Flipping is a quick & easy way to find out & isolate your highest performing & highest traffic keywords then refine them further without wasting time optimising keywords that won’t perform.
11 Comments on "Adwords Keyword Flipping"
benny
10. Dec 2007, 6:16 pm
Damn right we’re busy with those eBay Affiliate Websites. It is quite hard to get decent traffic on them, so that tool of yours might come with perfect timing
Jon
11. Dec 2007, 9:40 am
Nice read!
I was curious if you have more resources on the theory of ad score: Ad Score = CTR x Max Bid ??? (not that i’m challenging it) I wouldn’t mind learning more about it.
kjb1891
11. Dec 2007, 11:34 am
Hey Stu, have you ever used the keyword grouper tool feature that’s in Adwords Editor before? I think it’s supposed to take a large adgroup with a lot of keywords and divide it into smaller targeted adgroups.
If it does that task very well you could almost skip the keyword flipping(Not that it wasn’t a good idea
Jon
11. Dec 2007, 3:26 pm
Awesome, thanks Stu!
kjb1891, the keyword grouper is indeed a nice tool only if you have enough similarities among your generated keyword list. If not, you’ll end up getting some (if not quite a bit) 1 keyword groups, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but you’ll have to go through and manually setup all the ads for all the unnecessary (so to speak) number of adgroups generated.
Another option would be similar to speedppc and research your seed and extensions and whip up a keyword pairing php file (http://v3online.net/keywordpairing.php for example that I had a friend come up with) and just combine it all together and sort based on the extensions or seeds.
kjb1891
12. Dec 2007, 6:16 am
Jon, I bet the keyword grouper tool would be pretty useful for the content network since Google looks at the adgroup as a whole for the content network instead of individual keywords like they do for search huh?
Yahoo Search Marketing UK
20. Dec 2007, 2:51 am
AdWords sucks…… I quit them a year back….. MSN is the best in terms of traffic quality……. but yes the traffic is low…..
Marios Alexandrou
21. Dec 2007, 9:29 am
Sounds like you’ve come up with the same approach as Perry Marshall. He calls it “peel and stick” though.
paulette
22. Jan 2008, 7:16 am
I agree with you. Adwords plays an important role to site traffic. It increases the visibility of the page.
Andrew
12. Feb 2009, 12:57 pm
I wish rather than giving this a catchy name you gave it a name that read well in the copy.
Damn right we’re busy with those eBay Affiliate Websites. It is quite hard to get decent traffic on them, so that tool of yours might come with perfect timing
Nice read!
I was curious if you have more resources on the theory of ad score: Ad Score = CTR x Max Bid ??? (not that i’m challenging it) I wouldn’t mind learning more about it.
Hey Stu, have you ever used the keyword grouper tool feature that’s in Adwords Editor before? I think it’s supposed to take a large adgroup with a lot of keywords and divide it into smaller targeted adgroups.
If it does that task very well you could almost skip the keyword flipping(Not that it wasn’t a good idea
Awesome, thanks Stu!
kjb1891, the keyword grouper is indeed a nice tool only if you have enough similarities among your generated keyword list. If not, you’ll end up getting some (if not quite a bit) 1 keyword groups, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but you’ll have to go through and manually setup all the ads for all the unnecessary (so to speak) number of adgroups generated.
Another option would be similar to speedppc and research your seed and extensions and whip up a keyword pairing php file (http://v3online.net/keywordpairing.php for example that I had a friend come up with) and just combine it all together and sort based on the extensions or seeds.
Jon, I bet the keyword grouper tool would be pretty useful for the content network since Google looks at the adgroup as a whole for the content network instead of individual keywords like they do for search huh?
AdWords sucks…… I quit them a year back….. MSN is the best in terms of traffic quality……. but yes the traffic is low…..
Sounds like you’ve come up with the same approach as Perry Marshall. He calls it “peel and stick” though.
I agree with you. Adwords plays an important role to site traffic. It increases the visibility of the page.
I wish rather than giving this a catchy name you gave it a name that read well in the copy.
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Hey Jon, check out this webmaster world thread, it goes into things in a bit more detail on how bid prices are calculated:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/3236.htm
Stu