Hello, What are the rules as to when to use exact match, phrase match and broad match? Say if I bid the phrase "SEO Minnesota". If I do all 3 matches and bid the same price, which one should come up if some search "seo minnesota"? Is it true that you should bid lower for phrase match and exact match? Thanks in advance for your insights.
Exact overides Phrase & Broad Phrase overides Broad ... this is regardless of Max Bid/QS etc. I use Broad Match + Phrase Match to find more keywords. Yes, I do the normal clustering or '1-2-1' technique, but 95% of my business comes from exact matches and IMO that's how it should be. As for bidding lower for Broad then you do for Phrase, and lower for Phrase than you do for Exact, it makes sense, yes. Broad will bring in lots of clicks that simply aren't targetted so why pay the earth for each click? Phrase will bring in clicks that too aren't targetted so the same applies. Exact match brings in the most targetted clicks, so that's where you should spend your money. I also have them in their own campaigns, although sometimes have broad + phrase in the same campaign, depending on the amount of adgroups and keywords.
Picking up some good information from you from a number of your posts quite a few things that ive overlooked and what you have mentioned sounds very sensible.
Thanks Pipes - I often wonder why I don't start my own PPC blog and run people's campaigns for them for £££s, but the truth is, I don't have the time.
I'll just add my 2-pennorth - I think broad match should only be used for research purposes. I suspect a lot of small business users have no idea how broad it is. If you don't have the time, inclination or budget to use broad match in this way, and keep a very close eye on it, I suspect you can get through a lot of money without getting the ressults you expect by using broad match.
Yes, and to a degree, the same applies with the Phrase match too. At the end of the day - if you use something such as Statcounter and one of your broad/phrase matched keywords gets triggered - a decision has to be made once you know what the user searched for: - Do I add this search term that he/she searched for, as a new Exact Match? or - Do I need to add a negative to prevent this search triggering my phrase/broad keyword, again? There is a small 'problem' however - if the keyword hardly ever gets searched for, then adding it as an exact, may never get triggered - until the search term becomes more popular. So example: You have the phrase matched keyword - "blue widgets". Then somebody triggers that keyword by searching for "big blug widgets". If big blue widgets hardly ever gets searched for on Google, then Google might not display your new exact [big blue widgets] - it does seem to happen to me, especially when using misspelled keywords.
Well, Adwords only takes into account exact matched impressions/clicks when its taking CTR into consideration for calculating QS. It also only takes into account CTR on Google Search - not Search Partners (although this is wandering off topic).
Thanks for your response! Would you mind explaining what "normal clustering" and "1-2-1" are? Thanks again.
Clustering is where you have say 10 keywords to one Ad Group - all the keywords are related very closely and the ads also relate to each and every keyword. I only cluster keywords that have low weekly/monthly impressions or else if they have a lot of impressions, compared to the rest of your account do.... 1-2-1: Where 1 keyword goes into it's own Ad Group. The Ad Group then has 2 ads, which evenly rotate and this is called 'split testing'. It's easier to optimise for a single keyword and make each Ads relevant. It's also easier when deciding which ad to keep/delete as the ads have only ever been clicked on when that keyword has been searched for.