Do Duplicate Keywords across Multiple Ad Campaigns Affect Your Click Through Rate (CTR)?

Nov 26

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Do Duplicate Keywords across Multiple Ad Campaigns Affect Your Click Through Rate (CTR)? That’s the question of the day. I had a wonderful campaign selling a computer hardware product using Yahoo’s Search Marketing engine. (Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.) The first few sales from Commission Junction started to roll in and I looked towards fine-tuning the ad campaigns: isolating high-performance keywords, running different text to isolate successful ad copy, calculating the return per click (RPC).

I think my mistake was duplicating the ad campaigns (keywords and everything) and then modifying the ad text. At first, the click through rate CTR seemed fine, but lately it’s plummeted and the conversions from Commission Junction have fallen as well.

A quick search revealed that Google only displays one ad per keyword so duplicate keywords across Adword campaigns are unnecessary. (The better performing ad will run.) I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer for Yahoo. So the next experiment will be to pause the campaigns with duplicate keywords and just leave the best campaign running.

The learning curve continues.