Lesson 2: Selecting keywords
Your keyword list plays a vital role in your ad campaigns — it helps make sure that your ads are seen solely by users in your target audience. A basic keyword list can contain the names of the products or services you want to advertise.
To increase the precision of your keyword list, we recommend using WordStat, a tool that will make this step in creating your campaign an easy one. It helps not only select keywords, but also to refine your list and thereby exclude users outside your target audience that are less likely to be interested in your products and services.
Now we will show how to choose keywords in three steps. We’ll use an online store selling new furniture based in the Russian city of Novosibirsk as an example.
Think about which products or services you plan on advertising. Now imagine how users search for them — what words or phrases might they type into the Yandex search bar?
In WordStat, enter a query that clearly describes the product or service you are advertising, e.g. the brand name and model. Check the forecast for the number of monthly displays for this query and ones similar to it. You can add any queries with enough monthly impressions to your keyword list. If there are other similar queries with substantial views, add them as well. This will help you put together a keyword list made up of queries known to be popular among users.
We recommend choosing keywords made up of several words for your first campaign.
An online furniture store, for example, could use these keywords:
Take note of some of the specifics involved in serving ads for keywords:
Yandex.Direct includes all the declensions (word forms) of keywords by default:
Keep in mind that your ad will appear not just for your main query, but for nested queries as well. Nested queries contain all the words of the original query.
Nested queries for the keyword “buy furniture” would include:
as well as any other variants containing the original keyword.
Now we’ll take a look at how to exclude nested queries that are irrelevant for your ad campaign.
Create a keyword list and save it in a format that is convenient for you. You will be able to use this later when you are creating ads in your campaign.
Now that you have chosen your keywords, it’s time to think about which queries you don’t want your ads to appear for. Here it’s important to check what are referred to as long-tail queries, i.e. when additional words or phrases tacked on to your keywords. For example, if you serve ads for the keyword “buy furniture” and operate in Novosibirsk, the long-tail keyword “buy furniture in Novosibirsk” is worth adding to your keyword list. It is not such a good idea, however, to serve ads for “buy furniture second hand,” “buy used furniture” or “buy furniture in Moscow” as the users entering these queries are unlikely to be interested in your site.
To make sure your ads don’t appear for these irrelevant queries, separate them and add them to your negative keyword list.
As we already mentioned, negative keywords are those queries you do not want to trigger impressions for your ads.
You can apply the following negative keywords to the keyword “buy furniture”:
Doing so will prevent users searching for second-hand furniture from seeing your ads.
Save your negative keywords in a format convenient for you. You can add them at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level. In our example, we will add them when we create the campaign. Please note that you cannot add negative keywords longer than one word in length at the keyword level.
The following factors are taken into consideration when selecting ads for impressions:
- the keyword
- the bid set
- indicators that illustrate the ad’s performance
Choosing appropriate keywords is a necessary step to optimizing your ads’ performance and making sure your ads appear in the best positions at the lowest possible price.
Autotargeting allows you to launch search ads without selecting keywords beforehand.
To see how it works in detail, click to open the block below.
Indexing ads and landing pages
Responding to demand
Working with statistics
Correct. Impressions will take place for queries that:
- contain the full keyword buy corner sofa
- do not contain second hand, or cover.
Please note that second hand and secondhand are considered different keywords, so secondhand will not prevent impressions.
Not quite. Impressions will take place for queries that:
- contain the full keyword buy corner sofa
- do not contain second hand, or cover.
Please note that second hand and secondhand are considered different keywords, so secondhand will not prevent impressions.
Not quite. Impressions will take place for queries that:
- contain the full keyword buy corner sofa
- do not contain second hand, or cover.
Please note that second hand and secondhand are considered different keywords, so secondhand will not prevent impressions.