Sorry if this is long winded... I'm at my wits end. We have a budget around 20,000 a year for adwords and I've been given the job of managing the account. I've been studying night and day for a few weeks. They had just a slew (thousands) of genral keyowrds in there before I narrowed them down and they had a CPC limit of 2.50. Hardly any individual CPC for keywords, but a few they had 20.00. They recived about 40-60,000 a year in business, which is not that great. I researched keywords for this very saturated industry and found about 20 for each ad group (6 ad groups focused on different terms for the service) that had less compitition and were more spacific. I gave each word a bid based on a mix of market samuri and Googles sudgestions ranging from 1.00 - 6.00. My problem is, I don't know wheather to make these "Borad" [exsact} or the other one.. sorry if I got the puncuation wrong, but you know what I mean. Clicks have gone down drastacly, but it looks like they are staying on the site longer.... But, no takers, and geting nervous.
It is best to include all three match types and then review their performance after a week or two. The broad match type will improve your lack of clicks but again could reduce the amount of time they are spending on the site (basically an increase in quantity but lack of quality). The exact matches will attract exactly the type of clients you want but obviously cuts down a large sector of the potential market. What type of niche are you advertising in?
Thanks that helps, I'll try that this week. we are full service network solutions (cabling, voip, managment). The big push is managed IT. Days of searching, and just about any keyword for these services ... really competitive.
I find that phrase match is more effective than exact match. Exact match filters out too much, or you have to include every possible KW. eg. "dog training" would show up if 'get dog training tips' was typed, whereas [dog training] would not. Am I correct? You could imagine what a nightmare it would be to type every form of those words.
I prefer exact match because you get the most targeted traffic. True, you have to include more keywords, but it has seemed to be most effective for me in the longrun. Your total clicks may be less, but after all the important number is net profit and not gross sales.
Whilst I would always add the keyword as Exact Match; Phrase match can sometimes be more efficient, like in the following example: You sell red widgets and you find people often search for red widgets in * with * being a location. Now here, instead of adding every single [red widgets in manchester] [red widgets in London] etc you can have the phrase match "red widgets in" as it'll catch them all. If red widgets in London has a decent search amount, then you should put this as exact - but the phrase will pick all the rest that are hardly ever searched. That's the only time I feel the need to use phrase match over exact and of course you always need to be on the look out for negatives. Use: [Exact Match] if your budget is very limited [Exact Match] + "Phrase Match" if your budget is reasonable. All 3 if you have a pretty high budget and can afford to invest money into finding out more keywords and time to add negatives.
If you are gonna throw broad match in there.. bid alot cheaper on it and be sure to track it like crazy. Broad match is a joke these days.. and matches you with some terrible keywords that aren't even relevant. I tend to stay away from it completely