Well you can, but you’ll pay a lot more for it if you haven’t done the prep work.
The question from the client was “Can we just add this keyword to our campaign?” The problem was that the keyword (a product brand) didn’t exist anywhere on the site. So if we managed to find someone looking for that product brand, we’d have nowhere specific to send them. And if we chose an irrelevant landing page this would push up the cost of the product brand keyword.
An example – Rugby vs football (not the age old argument down the pub)
Let’s say you had an ecommerce site selling sports equipment. If you chose rugby ball as your keyword but sent the visitor to a page on football/soccer balls, Google would say “that’s not relevant”. It would be a poor experience for Google’s search users and those users’ clicks would be much more expensive – kind of a punishment for making Google’s users suffer this poor experience.
(If you want to get into the detail, the lack of the keyword would cause a “below average” landing page experience. This in turn would cause the keyword Quality Score to suffer and this in turn would drive up the cost per click for that keyword).
To make matters more complicated, this was not a live product brand, so there were no live products to put in a category page (even if we created one).
So what’s the prep work then?
We need to create a standalone landing page, linked in the footer. This new page will explain what had happened to the old product brand and what the replacement products are. At the end of the page description we need to add the call to action for the next step… To drive the visitors on to the category page that lists the replacement products.
Once we optimise this new page (title tag, meta description, page title and page description) it can begin collecting organic (non-paid) search traffic all by itself. Meanwhile we can begin creating an ad campaign or ad group for it.
Are we nearly there yet?
Nope. Keywords don’t have to go into the ads. (That’s a surprise for some). They go into a list attached to the ads and we are looking at a trademarked product brand keyword.
Trademarks
Google has no problem with trademarked keywords on their own. You can read Google’s policy on trademarks here.
However, if we include a trademark in the ad text then that’s a different story and the Trademarks policy kicks in big time. You’d better be prepared with some evidence that you are an authorised reseller. And that means having someone at the trademark owners who would be happy to fill in a Google online form that confirms you have the right to use this trademark. Otherwise those freshly written ads will be pulled or restricted until you can prove the above.
In reality, for this client it won’t happen because the trademark isn’t active – there’s no official person to fill in the form. So we can’t put the keyword in the ad text or the ads will be restricted. But we can use it just as a keyword and do everything else listed above.
So that’s what we are doing. Will let you know how it turns out.
And if you’d like some help with your Google Ads campaigns, please get in touch.