Google Adwords and Keyword Match Types Introduction

Keep the Intruders Out of Your Adwords Campaign…

Think of the following. You have a business in buying and selling and renting flats in Cape Town and you’ve decided to run a Google Adwords campaign and you’ve discovered a very long list of keywords just as you should and let’s say the following are a few examples of that long list of keywords

• Beachfront Flat
• Beachfront Flats
• Cape Town Flat
• Cape Town Flats
• Sea Point Flat
• Sea Point Flats

If a searcher comes along and enters Cape Flats into the search box then your ad will probably show up because you were bidding on the broad term namely Cape Town Flats and this keyword includes the 2 words Cape and Flats.

You can be pretty sure that someone typing Cape Flats into Google was not looking for a flat in Cape Town. So this is a dilemma and is one of the major contributors to high click costs and low sales conversion. There is a solution within Google Adwords that few people pay any attention to.

Look at this list again … why would a person selling Cape Town Flats advertise Beachfront Flats? Of course there are such flats in Cape Town but so there are in Durban, PE and maybe even Blikkiesdorp.

More about keywords

The list above is one of 6 different match types that can be used in Google and this list contains BROAD MATCH keywords only. Just as the name implies the keywords are very broad, untargeted and far reaching.

A BROAD MATCH keyword means that so long as the Adword campaign keyword are contained in the search query then the ad could show up no matter what other words or word order were contained in the search query.

• Flats Town Cape
• Flats Cape Town
• Town Cape Flats
• Cape Town
• Cape Flats
• Flats Cape
• Cape Town Beachfront Holiday Flats and so on.

Bidding on broad terms like this can cost a lot of money and get very little targeted traffic so you need to be very careful. However this is a powerful bidding strategy.

There are also PHRASE and EXACT match types. The above list is converted to PHRASE match by using inverted commas around the keyword eg

"Flats Cape Town"

A PHRASE match means that when a searcher types in a query containing the 3 words Flats, Cape and Town then the 3 words must be in exactly the order in the keyword or the ad will not show. This means if you bid only on "Flats Cape Town" you ad will only possibly be shown for queries such as… Holiday Flats Cape Town or Flats Cape Town Hout Bay.

The third important Match type is EXACT matching. EXACT matches are contained within square brackets eg [Flats Cape Town]. This type of match means your ad will be shown only if the EXACT term… Flats Cape Town… is queried. The ad will not show for Cape Town Flats or Holiday Flats Cape Town for example.

By manipulating these keywords it becomes possible to get different cost per clicks and thus get greater control over adspend, ad position, click through rate and conversion.

Let’s now come back to my original example Beachfront Flats. You can use what are called NEGATIVE keyword match to eliminate non Cape Town regions eg

• -Durban
• -PE
• -East London and so on

This means if someone types Beachfront Flats Durban or Beachfront Flats PE your ad will not be displayed.

These are very basic examples of match types available in Google Adwords. Very few advertisers use these matches effectively. At the workshop I will delve deeply into keyword matching and how to use the matches to save large amounts of adspend. If you’re a significant buyer of Google Adwords traffic (say R30,000 + per month) you will probably save the cost of the workshop which is R5000 within the first 2 months just from this small section of the workshop.