In a fiercely competitive market, where clicks are £1.50 or more, together we established that he was wasting around £50 PER DAY on irrelevant clicks that had absolutely no chance of becoming sales.

Why? Keyword match-types.

You will hopefully be aware that Google Adwords provides three different keyword match types; broad match, phrase match and exact match.

Starting with the last first, Exact Keyword matching will only show your ad when the search term (what your customer types in to Google) matches your keyword exactly, no misspelling, no typos, no plural, no partial matching.

Secondly, Phrase Match will match the search term if it includes your phrase somewhere; the phrase “red dress” would be matched to searches for ‘ladies red dress’, ‘girl in a red dress’, ‘make a red dress’, ‘red dress design’, ‘red dress lyrics’. Now, of course some of these are relevant, but some are not and potentially waste your budget.

Phrase Matching is quite tightly targeted though, so the same phrase would not match searches such as ‘red evening dress’, ‘red cocktail dress’ or even ‘dress red’ or ‘dress red’. The words are in a different order or do not form the phrase you’re bidding on, so you should thoroughly research and include each variation in your campaign to avoid missing that traffic.

Lastly, Broad Matching is the widest possible match type, and matches any search which includes the words in your keyword, misspellings, plurals, the words in a different order.

This is fine in some circumstances, but we would advise caution; research all possible search variations which might match your keyword. In the example broad match ‘red dress’, this matches; red head dress, dressing in red, red gingham dress, red white and blue dress, red or dead dress, red dressing gown and many other, potentially wasteful clicks which aren’t relevant enough.

Some of the terms may be relevant, and you want that traffic anyway. But matching one broad match keyword in this way will make it difficult to target that keyword with a relevant ad and to land that searcher on the right page on your site, impossible to measure the success of each search term and you’ll pay a lot more for each click.

Worse still, Google AdWords also uses what it calls, ‘expanded matching‘ on broad match keywords, often using synonyms. In a recent example, fujitsu bracket might match ‘mount fuji’ and ‘monitor mount’ matches a search for ‘shower screen bracket’! Completely irrelevant.

So, what should your keyword strategy be?

Depending on your market, budget and your personal preference, we might recommend bidding on phrase matches to begin with, researching as many variations as possible, or using only exact matching to start. In either case, a small number of broad matches should also be included to pick up anything you missed in your research. You can then frequently monitor the search query report for your account to add more phrase or exact match variations, or use negative keywords to exclude the irrelevant searches you find.

CAUTION: if you have been using broad match keywords in your account, removing them all in one go can upset the ecology of your campaign – be very careful before implementing a policy change such as this.

For advanced keyword strategies, try live one on one coaching – guaranteed satisfaction or your money back.

Alternatively, have one of our professionals carry out a free audit of your campaign and tell you where you’re going wrong.

If you really want to be able to measure performance and optimise your campaign effectively, there’s a little more to it.

Example

Dennis and Steve run a garden landscaping business in the South West of England.

Their campaign uses location targeting, of course. There’s a main ad group, already bidding on all the relevant terms; landscaping, best landscaping, landscaping experts, landscaping company, landscaping firm and so forth.

There are also other ad groups with keywords and ads relevant to each geographic area that services are offered; an ad group for Bristol, and ad group for Somerset, and ad group for Bath. All great practice that will demonstrate relevance to the audience and improve their CTR.

What They Missed

But here’s something they hadn’t considered:

Keyword 1: landscaping company – shows a generic Landscaping ad

Keyword 2: landscaping Bristol – shows a Bristol Landscaping ad.

When a searcher types in “landscaping company bristol“, Google has to guess which of your keywords is most relevant. Remember, Google AdWords is a piece of software that measures words, it has no idea that the word Bristol is more important than the word company in this example.

Clearly, this is a very simple example to demonstrate the point. The obvious remedy is also to bid on the keyword “landscaping company bristol” in the Bristol ad group, of course.

But your campaign is going to be a whole lot more complicated, with a whole lot more keyword variations, so the most effective solution (for this example, anyway) is this:

Use each of the locations as negative keywords in your generic ad groups.

Therefore, it would be good practice to use Bristol as a negative keyword in the main landscaping ad group. This tells Google that if the searcher is looking for landscaping services in Bristol, their search matches only keywords in the Bristol ad group and the searcher sees Bristol Landscaping ads and nothing else.

Lower Cost Per Click

This practice will improve your Click Through Rate (CTR), and improve your overall quality score and lead to a reduced cost per click and therefore a reduced Acquisition Cost.

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Using the example of a campaign selling hubcaps, if you don’t sell Renault hubcaps, make sure you use “-Renault” in your campaign. If you provide a service in a particular geographic area, get a list of all of the places outside of that area and include them as negative keywords.

Using Google, search for your keywords and see what results come up. Retry your search using search term -keyword -keyword -keyword in the search box, keep applying this until all of the irrelevant results are filtered from your search. Whatever negative keywords are now included in your search query, add to your ad groups or campaigns so that others users searching or those irrelevant terms don’t see your ad.

This improves your quality score, and therefore the cost per click for your ad or improves your position. The improvement in your position should increase your click through rate (CTR). The increase in click through rate is rewarded with a better quality score, which again then should reduce your cost per click.

It pays to be relevant.

Get more tips in the Free AdWords Guide, or contact me to discuss your campaign.