Oldest question in the book...

Hi Guys,
I'm doing Internet marketing for a while now. I do mostly SEO but also PPC with AdWords.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the different keyword matching option (exact, phrase, broad & negative), and i wonder what are the different techniques people are using...

I do mostly [exact match] - The up sides i find in exact match is that i know exactly what the visitor typed, once i have a conversion rate it would pretty match stay stable because i am pulling the same kind of people into my site.
The down side i see in exact match is that i miss all the daily unique search queries that i (and my keyword tool) didn't expect.

Lets say i'm selling remote control cars, and i have an ad group for "remote control trucks".
I can create a huge keyword list of what ever comes to mind for example:

[blue remote control truck]
[blue remote control trucks]
[quickly charged remote control trucks]
[quickly charged remote control truck]
[remote control trucks that are charged quickly]

And the possibilities are endless....

Or i can put a broad match of:

remote control truck

And put in a big list of negative keywords. This way i will probably get more traffic but i wouldn't know exactly what are the key phrases that convert for me.

What do you prefer and what are your thought on these options...
thanks

 

I'd use Phrase Match initially, then after a few weeks or so (depending on your traffic volumes), run a Search Query report.

This will list all of the queries that people searched for that generated a click on your advert. Either add these in on exact match or negative match (depending on whether they are relevant or not) and let the campaign run. Eventually, the Phrase matches will get fewer and fewer clicks, until you can delete them.

After a couple of months or so, I'd delete any keywords with no impressions, since they'll never generate a significant number of conversions.

You should also look at reorganising these keywords in Adgroups, so that the advert text matches the keywords as closely as possible.

 

I agree with custardmite, except I go as far as using broad match intially and I use my own referrer logs to find keywords to negate.

 

Thanks CustardMite,

One thing I don't understand about your technique and hope you can explain it:

How can i know what is the exact key phrase the user type in Google? I mean: Let say i have an ad group with a phrase match - "cheap laptops", how can i know if the visitor came by typing "dell cheap laptops" or "cheap laptops by IBM"?
I thought AdWords sends my sites logs only the phrase i bidded on - "cheap laptops" for all clicks... Unlike organic search which reveals the exact search phrase.

 

As I have most of my main keywords in their own Ad Groups, the ones with Broad Matched keywords in, have ?kw={keyword} at the end of the ads destination URL. This just helps me find out which of my keywords was actually triggered for a broad search.
I then go to my statcounter control panel and look for what keyword was used. For example, if Blue Widgets was used to find my website, yet ?kw=widgets appears in my logs .. I know that Blue Widgets isn't in my account, and my broad matched keyword widgets is what was used instead. So I either add [blue widgets] as an exact match or I could add blue or blue widgets as a negative.

Pretty straightforward really. I don't use the search query report, because I don't run a huge account - and to be honest, the SQR is pretty poor anyway. Most of those report just say '1 unique query' and the like. Pretty useless.

 

If you look in the reports options, one of them is a Search Query Report.

This will show you what people were searching for...

 

I agree with CustardMite. Expand out a little bit beyond exact into phrase. Then run a Search Query Report and compare it to your keyword list in your account. For every query that is not a keyword in you campaign yet, decide whether it is good or bad, and then add it explicitly or set it as a negative keyword, whichever is correct.

 

All very good advice here. Once you run a couple test keywords, (broad will get your more traffic, phrase will be more targeted), you can run that report, (if you don't have a keyword tracking system that will show search queries without the report). Those keywords are the ones you put into exact match.