Commercial Registrant – Internet Marketing & Domain Names

Keyword Match Types are a very confusing aspect of PPC advertising and it might be one of the most important factors that could “make or break” your business, if your business depends on Adwords (or Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing AdCenter etc) traffic.

The most confusing part of all – and the part most advertisers often fail to realize-, is that even though some PPC platforms feature equivalent keyword match types, there are cases that the functionality of a certain match type might vary quite a bit from platform to platform.

I’ve covered the differences from match type to match type in all large search engines in a previous post (see Keyword Match Types), but for the sake of illustrating my point I’ll mention a brief example below:

Take for example Google’s Adwords “Broad Match” VS Bing’s AdCenter “Broad Match” VS Yahoo Search Marketing “Advanced Match”(which is the equivalent to the Broad Match):

- Google Adwords will match any query that includes all the keywords including singular, plural, spelling alternatives and synonyms. Google will also match what their algorithm considers to be related queries. This combined with their “Automatic Match”(see Keyword Match Types) is enough to nominate Google’s Broad Match for the title of “The Broadest Of All Broad Match Types” on the web. You bid on Baby gifts and your ad might show up for Child Gifts. Bid on Ferrari Cars and your ad will trigger on Luxury Cars. What a money-sucking black hole!

-Yahoo Search Marketing is the same as the above basically, however they are not as “broad”. Unlike Google, related queries usually do not trigger your ad to show.

-MSN (Bing) will match a query that includes all the words but they will not always combine singular and plural, but there is(in certain cases) some light synonym matching.

So as you see, even though all search engines offer a broad match equivalent, you will find many differences from one provider to another.

Make sure you know what each keyword match type stands for on the platform you are bidding on so that you can adjust your efforts and budget accordingly, otherwise you are wasting money. Save that money and invest it in a smarter way, or you know, just take your wife for a lobster dinner.

So what can you do to save yourself some money and increase your profit along the way?

First you need to realize that you are possibly wasting a big part of your budget on broad match – unless you really know what you’re doing. If you are running 100% broad match, chances are that the majority of your traffic is irrelevant and you are throwing money down the drain. Even if you are making profit, your CTR will be a lot lower than what it could be with more targeted bidding which would drive your quality score down and your CPC up and again, you would be paying more than you should for each ad position.

Converting your bidding from broad match to exact or phrase match will definitely yield better converting traffic and in the long run, it will lower your cost per click as your CTR rises. Here are a few simple basic steps you can take in order to optimize your campaigns for better ROI:

1. Create very focused ad groups

Try to create ad groups with closely related keywords. The fewer keywords in each ad group, the more targeted your ad group is (with just one keyword per ad group being the best option optimization-wise), that closely match your text ad and landing page. This will drive up the quality score and minimize your costs.

2. Create different ad groups for Broad, Phrase and Exact match

This is crucial and you should have a way of tracking your conversions. If you are not tracking, you better pause your campaigns and figure out a way to track conversions otherwise your entire effort is going down the drain. It’s impossible to know which keywords and which match type converts best if you have no tracking installed. But this is something I’m going to cover some other time. For now, it’s enough to say that Google, Bing and Yahoo offer conversion tracking as part of their advertising platforms and it’s a piece of cake to install them. If you are running campaigns as an affiliate, ask your merchant or your affiliate network if they can install your tracking pixel on the thank you page, in 99% of the cases they will be happy to do it.

So track, and create different ad groups for each match type. This way you will know which match type converts best and has the best ROI.

3. Use negative keyword matching!!!

Try to figure out which keyword match types you do not want to trigger your ad and include them in your campaigns. Google’s external keyword tool will suggest a few for you but you will also need to carefully go through the list because it is an automatically generated list and understandably there will be a lot of keywords you will not want to add as negatives.

Furthermore, once you get your campaign going and you start getting clicks, you can generate a “search query performace” report from your adwords account which will show you which queries triggered your ad to show. Go through it and identify which of those queries are irrelevant and should be negatives.

Negative match types are very underestimated and sometimes will be the factor that can turn a campaign profitable in a matter of hours from implementation.

Note that negative matches should be used for broad match and phrase match bids. Exact matches do not need negative keywords because the ad is only triggered if the query is identical to keyword you are bidding on.

There is so much info that I want to share with you and I could expand on any of the above subjects and keep going for hours. I will do my best to post good quality content over the next months so keep an eye on this blog.

In case you haven’t seen the previous post on the various match types and how they vary from platform to platform, you should definitely read it! If you’ve spent the time to read this post up to this point then it would be a shame not to check it out because it’s so closely related and it’s information I haven’t covered here, plus it’s info you won’t easily find anywhere else without spending considerable time googling:) Here it is.

One Response to “Learn How To Use Match Types Correctly & Save Money!”