The first mistake that people often make when setting up a Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search campaign for their business is that they don’t go after key phrases, instead targeting only single key words. If you sell websites for bands and then make the gaffe of bidding to show up for ‘websites’, you may quickly find out how to destroy your monthly budget in a couple of hours! The reason this can happen is that ‘websites’ applies to not only website designs of all types, including all industries that aren’t the music industry, it also applies to any use of ‘websites’ outside of website design. When you consider how many different ways ‘websites’ can be used as a search term, it’s easy to see how your campaign could receive several million impressions a day! Of course, you won’t see that many before your account is turned off from reaching it’s daily or monthly spend limit. Regardless, the quality of the traffic you receive from this term will be poor as well, since you’ll get a lot of clicks from people who aren’t looking to buy a website design for a band. So it’s clear to see how these kinds of low-quality, high-traffic terms have earned the name “bleeder terms.”
The best way to go is very conservatively at first, picking only phrases that describe your products/services in full detail. In case you’re wondering what PaidSearchPros would try out in this example, we’d go after key phrases like “band website design” or “music marketing” at first, ones that are very specific.