Keyword Matching Options Explained
If you’re doing any Pay-per-click advertising for your marketing campaigns, you should definitely understand the differences between the keyword matching options. In all 3 of the major PPC advertising companies (Google, Yahoo and MSN), you will have to choice of 4 different keyword matching options.
They are as follows:
- Broad Match
- Phrase Match
- Exact Match
- Negative Match
It’s vitally important that you understand the differences between the different keyword matching options before you start any search engine marketing. The different matching options will determine how many impressions your ad receives and what your cost per click for that keyword might be. Lets first look at broad and negative keyword matching options in further detail.
Broad Match
Now lets say for example you were promoting an affiliate program that offers music player downloads. You have determined that you want to use the keyword phrase “download music players” in one of your adgroups.
By entering “download music players“, without any surrounding quotes, it will be interpreted as a broad match. This is usually the default for the search engine advertising as it will give you the most impressions. For example, your ad will show up if someone were to type the following search queries:
- download music players
- downloading music players
- music players to download
- sites with music player downloads free
You can see that the order doesn’t matter when you are using a broad match, as long as those three root keywords download, music and player is all there. It will also match the plural versions, past and future tenses of the words to increase the exposure to your ad.
Also be aware, that search engines substitute synonyms where it feels it might fit with broad matches. They often won’t tell you this but queries that might also show this particular ad include:
- mp3 player download
- audio download players
- sound effect player download
- download video players
These queries are determined by the search engine to be related to the original keyword phrase “download music players.” Often times, this can be good because it will give you a wider audience using words that you might not have thought of.
On the other hand, it can have a negative effect on your ad quality. In the last keyword example “download video players” your ad might show but you are offering a music player and not a video player. This will generate a lot of unnecessary impressions and lower your CTR (click-through rate) because the people are looking for a video player not necessarily a music one.
It’s imperative that you have a program like hittail installed on your landing pages so you can find out the exact search queries that are getting people to click on your ad. You may be surprised at the types of keywords that the search engines determine to match your broad keywords and you’ll want to filter some of these out.
Negative Keywords
The best way to filter out the unwanted keywords is to use negative keywords. When you enter a negative keyword into your campaign or adgroup, and queries containing these words will not show up. So, you might want to add the word “video” as a negative keyword to insure that your ad isn’t shown if someone is looking for a video player. Also the word “free” is generally a good negative keyword to have in all your campaigns because you want to eliminate the freebie seekers.
There is the basic overview of a broad keywords. Next, I’ll be looking at phrase and exact keywords that will lower your total impressions but allow greater precision in your ad campaigns.
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Filed under: Keywords, Search Marketing on November 23rd, 2007
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