Using Misspellings in AdWords

by Kevin on February 27, 2009

Had someone ask me about running a campaign of common misspellings for her keywords in AdWords and whether it was worth her time. Well, the answer, as with most things, is “it depends.” I used to always include a misspellings campaign for clients but haven’t bothered recently and here’s why.

If you’re running most of your keywords on broad match (don’t forget the negatives) then chances are you’re going to be showing for misspelled queries. Google automatically corrects query spelling and shows results based on the correction.

On the other hand, if you’re running everything on exact match then it may make sense to include some misspelled terms on exact match as well.

In addition, some people believe that overall quality score for the account can take a hit if you run misspellings because searchers generally won’t take action on a result for a misspelled query. Despite the impression you may get, click-through rate goes down and so does your quality score.

In the end, it’s really up to the person running the campaign. Does the audience require a little help to reach you? Is your product name hard to spell? Try out some misspellings and see if they convert. If they don’t, give them the boot quickly and spend your time on the optimizing and developing the keywords that do.

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