Different PPC Keyword Options
For those of you that are doing pay-per-click advertising with Google AdWords, are you using the different keyword variations? I realized today that a lot of people are probably running their keyword lists in a very inefficient way and this could greatly impact how much you’re making from your advertising with AdWords.
With Google AdWords there are 4 types of keywords you can bid on. Different keywords types have different features so its very important that you understand the difference and how it can impact where you’re showing up in your search engine marketing. So here they are:
Broad Match
Sadly, this is the one that a lot of people are probably doing without even knowing it. If you just have the keyword phrase typed in normally on your keyword list, you’re doing a broad match. So let’s say for example that you’re bidding on the phrase mountain bike. Your ad will show up when someone types in mountain bike, blue mountain bike, i want to bike the mountain, etc. Any phrase that has those two words in it will bring up your ad. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know for you! Test it and find out if it’s doing you any good.
Phrase Match
To do a phrase match, you just have to put the phrase inside of quotation marks. So sticking with our last example it would be “mountain bike”. Now in order for your site to show up those two words have to be together. So you would show up for mountain bike, blue mountain bike, but not for i want to bike the mountain because the two words are not together in the phrase. Is this a good or bad thing? Again, I don’t know for you! Test it and find out!
Exact Match
To do an exact match, put the phrase inside square brackets like this: [mountain bike]. This will only allow your ad to show up on the phrase mountain bike.
Negative Match
This is how you exclude words from your list. Maybe you don’t sell blue mountain bikes. If so, then just add -blue to your list and you won’t show up for phrases with that word.
Is this information a surprise to you? Did you think you were doing exact matches when you were really doing broad matches? If so, you might want to go make some changes to your keyword list and see how it affects things. Also, when you have different types of keywords you can bid on them differently as well. So for example, you could bid $0.20 on the phrase [mountain bike] and $0.15 on “mountain bike” and $0.05 on mountain bike because AdWords will treat them as different keywords.
Experiment with the different types and see what gets you the best conversions. Remember, with PPC you don’t want to just be paying for traffic, we want to focus on those words that will actually perform the best.
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I just do a complete sweep of every term - ie “HDMI Switch” [HDMI switch] and HDMI Switch, with different bids for exact, phrase, and broad. In what situation would you suggest cutting back and just using one or two of the three possible?
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It depends on which ones convert for you and which ones don’t. If you find that you’re spending quite a bit of money on “HDMI Switch” for example and not getting enough sales off of it to offset your cost, then you need to change something with that keyword. In PPC we only want to pay for words that make a profit, not ones that just bring us traffic.
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WOOD IDEA
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