hi all. i am new to Adwords, so please pardon mine ignorance. while checking ad display, i have notice that keyword in one of my competitors advert appeared bold, even though i was searching for keyword with hyphen in it. to illustrate it better. lets say i searched in Google for: book monte-cristo , but competitor's ad displayed: book monte cristo my question is: does this mean, that i do not need to list variations of the same keyword with hyphen? are keywords with or without hyphen in them really the same? thanks Fili
Unfortunately, Google changes the way they display your ads from time to time, and there's no penalty (that's I've seen) to add a hyphenated version. If the keyword trigger phrase you're using gets lots of impressions (or clicks), I'd highly recommend adding a hyphenated version of the phrase. The upside of adding a hyphenated keyword trigger phrase is you might have a lot less competition... giving you naturally higher clickthru rates and even lower cost per clicks. Some would say you'd even eliminate the Google Adwords Quality Score penalty, too. Try it out... submit both versions to Google and see which gets more impressions and clicks -- you might be surprised.