Keyword Matching Options

I recommend watching the following video by Google that explains keyword matching options:

Google Video - Keyword Matching Options

Google uses four different keyword matching options to make your keyword searches more specific. There is usually a bit of confusion over these keywords, especially for AdWord beginners, so read over this carefully. The four keyword match options are Broad Matched, Phrase Matched, Exact Matched, and Negative Matched.

Broad Matched – ex. keyword. The keyword is entered without any modifications.

Broad matched keywords are the most common type of keywords used by advertisers. They usually bring in the largest amounts of traffic, but generally don’t have the highest conversion rates because they are so broad. Basically if you add a keyword into the keyword box, then that keyword is broad. According to Google, Broad matched keywords display your advertisement whenever a single word within the key phrase is searched. For example, if your keyword is “funny Simpsons movie” then your advertisement will be displayed when someone searches for “funny”, “simpsons”, or “movie”. Google says that your advertisement will also be displayed if someone uses a search phrase which contains any one of those terms, for example – “that was funny”, or “I like movies” will also display your advertisement. Even though Google says that your advertisement will display for all of those irrelevant searches, I have found that your advertisement will 99% of the time only be displayed if most of the search term is similar to your keyword, such as “Simpsons movie”, or “funny Simpsons”. I would recommend making a broad matched copy of every keyword you have, because broad matched keywords are mainly what Google’s Contextual Advertisement analyzes when they place your Ads on other websites (I will talk more about this later).

Phrase Matched – ex. “keyword”. Keyword is within quotation marks.

Phrase matched keywords are displayed only when your keyword(s) appears inside their search phrase in order. For example, if your keyword is “red shoes”, your advertisement will be displayed on searches for “green or red shoes”, “colorful red shoes”, but it will not be displayed for searches for “red or green shoes”, or “red colorful shoes”. You see, when you are using phrase match, your Ad will only be displayed when your keywords are next to each other in the web surfers search phrase. Phrase matched keyword performance is in between Broad Matched and Exact Matched. They usually give you more traffic than Exact Match, but less traffic than Broad Match. They usually give you higher conversion rates than Broad Match, but not as many as Exact Match.

Exact Matched – ex. [keyword]. Keyword is within brackets.

Exact matched keywords do what they say. They are only displayed if the user wants to search for a keyword that is exactly the same as one of your keywords. Exact match keywords usually don’t receive many clicks, but they usually have the highest conversion rates.

Negative Matched – ex. –Keyword. Keyword has a minus sign in front of it.

Negative Matched keywords may be a little confusing, but they are good to use if you are advertising for a product with a popular name that has several other completely different products. Negative Matched keywords purpose is to allow people to filter their keywords from certain searches which will not give them good results. Here is an example. Let’s say someone was advertising for Pepsi Cola and one of their keywords was “cola”. Then that person would not expect many sales from people who searched for Coca-Cola, so to keep their advertisement from being viewed by anyone who was searching for Coca-Cola products, they would add the negative keyword –coca to their keyword list. When they did this their advertisement would show anytime someone searched for Pepsi or Cola, but it would not show if anyone typed the word “cola” into their search phrase.

Examples for Broad, Phrase, & Exact matched keywords

This is when Google says your keywords will show:

Users Key phrase	Broad Matched keyword	Phrase Matched keyword	Exact Matched keyword
	red shoe	"red shoe"	[red shoe]
tennis shoes	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red candy tastes good	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
I hate red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red Nike shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red tennis shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red shoe	displayed	displayed	displayed

When actually this is when they will really show:

Users Key phrase	Broad Matched keyword	Phrase Matched keyword	Exact Matched keyword
	red shoe	"red shoe"	[red shoe]
tennis shoes	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red candy tastes good	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
I hate red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red Nike shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red tennis shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red shoe	displayed	displayed	displayed

When you read about Broad Matched keywords, Google makes you think that they will appear any time someone’s search phrase contains one word in your keyword. This is not true, I have found that most of the time the keyword will only appear when some searches for that keyword.

Benefits of Keyword Matching

You may be thinking, “So why would I want to use keyword matching…it sounds really complicated?”. The main advantage of using keyword matching options is that you reach 100% of your potential customers.

You may think, “But broad matched keywords will cover both phrase and exact match types, why should I use anything other than broad match?”. That is true, but broad matched keywords are designed to show your advertisements for a variety of different keyword searches. Phrase and exact match are designed to show your ad for more specific searches. Think about it. If you have a 6 competitors with the broad matched keyword “Motorola cell phone”, but you have the exact match keyword “Motorola cell phone”, whose advertisement do you think Google will display first. Well, Google doesn’t directly say “We display exact matched advertisements over everything else”, but Google does say that they give the most targeted and appropriate text advertisements a higher quality score, and I can say that phrase and exact matched keywords are more targeted than broad matched.

So basically keyword matching options give you more traffic, higher quality scores, and higher profit rates.

I recommend you watch the following video below by Google. It will help to further explain the benefits of Keyword Matching Options.

Google Video - Functions & Benefits of Keyword Matching

Wrapping Your Keywords

When you wrap your keywords (so each keyword is broad, phrase, and exact match) you’re not going to need to type out each keyword and add quotations and brackets around each keyword. Instead there is a much easier way by using a free tool that will do this quickly for you. To access this tool go to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwrapper.cgi

To use this tool simply copy your keywords in the text file (you can do this by highlighting all of your keywords and right clicking on them and select “Copy”) and then paste (right click in the text box and select “Paste”) them into the text box titled “Enter Keywords” in the keyword wrapping tool. Now click on the button titled “Wrap AdWords” and you will see the four boxes below the “Enter Keywords” box fill up with keywords.

Since we have already grouped our keywords, we will not need to worry about using any grouping features. One of the four text boxes that filled with keywords is titled “Broad, “Phrase”, & [Exact] Match”, this is the box that we will get all of our keywords from. To get your keywords from this box click on the button above the box titled “Copy”. This will copy the keywords to your clipboard.

Finally, Adding the Keywords to your AdGroup

When you’ve wrapped the keywords in your keyword list (remember negative keyword wrapping isn’t necessary) it’s time for you to add the keywords to your AdGroup. This is probably the easiest part, because all you need to do is highlight all the keywords, copy them, and then paste them into the keyword area in your AdGroup setup page.

Finishing the AdGroup Setup

When you’ve added the keywords to your account, you’re pretty much done with your AdGroup setup. All you have left to do is to set your advertising budget and then save your AdGroup.

Setting Your AdGroup Budget

After you’ve submitted your keywords, you will be at a page that asks you what your Max CPC is as well as your max daily advertising budget. I usually enter anywhere from $0.05 - $0.15 per click for my max keyword bid and I recommend starting off with a max daily advertising budget of $8-$10 per day. This way you don’t need to worry about spending more money than you’re making because the most amount of money a mistake can cost you is $10.

Make sure you enter your max CPC bid correctly. For example, in the USA we separate our dollars and cents by a period (ex $100.00), but sometimes other countries separate their dollars and cents by commas (ex 34,94). If you enter your currency incorrectly Google will remove it from your bid. So if you live in the USA and you accidentally enter a bid of $0,20 rather than $0.20, Google will remove the comma making your bid $20! This has actually happened to me once when I was multi-tasking and in three days a campaign I wanted to spend maybe $20-40 on ended up costing me $6,000. If this happens to you, contact Google immediately and they will issue you a credit. In my case they gave me back $3,000. But by setting a maximum daily advertising budget of $10 per day, you will avoid a simple mistake costing you as much money as it did me.

Creating Additional Text Ads

Hopefully your AdGroup setup went flawlessly and you now have low minimum bids for your keywords (low bids in my opinion are minimum bids $0.15 or less) and they are all active for search. If just a few of your keywords are inactive, either pause the keywords or delete them. I don’t want you to start raising bids to activate keywords just yet because you don’t know if that will help or damage your account.

I know some of you may have hit a wall and more than a few (or all) of your keywords are now inactive for search. If this is you, don’t worry because I will tell you what to do. If your keywords are inactive for search go to the section titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”, this section is later in the guide so you may need to go to the table of contents to find it.

If your keyword statuses are “Ok” or “Great” then it’s time for you to create some more text ads for your AdGroup. To do this, just go to your AdGroup and click on the “Text Ads” tab. This will take you to a page where you can click on a link to “Create a new text advertisement”. I recommend having at least 3-4 different text advertisements in each of your AdGroups (I usually have one text advertisement that uses dynamic keyword insertion), because this is what Google recommends. You should know how to create awesome text ads by now, if you need a little help, just review the section titled “How to write killer text ads”.