Let’s continue with our Google AdWords case study. In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads. Today we take a look at keywords and how they’re linked with the text ads.
Note that the first few articles in this series are pretty basic, as I need to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to understanding AdWords. I’ve found that not everyone actually understands some of these concepts, though.
Keyword Targeting vs. Site Targeting
An AdWords ad campaign is a high-level grouping of ads. All ads within the campaign (which are further grouped into ad groups, which we’ll discuss shortly) share a number of characteristics: which geographies and languages they’re for, the total ad spend for the day, whether the ads are targeted at the search network (Google) and/or the content network (AdSense). Most of these things you can change at any time, but one of the things you have to decide straight off the bat is whether you’re using keyword targeting or site targeting for your campaign.
Keyword targeted ads are ads that are associated with specific search keywords. Essentially you’re telling Google to show a particular ad (or set of ads) whenever a Google user enters a search term that involves that keyword or keyphrase.
Site targeted ads, on the other hand, are targeted at specific sites that are in Google’s content network. Site targeting is the backbone of the AdWords180 technique (now being discussed in other AdWords books to some extent, including the just-released Affiliate Rockstar Status). It is not, however, the focus of most AdWords ad campaigns.
I just wanted to make the distinction clear, because this case study only deals with keyword targeted ads.
AdWords Ad Groups
Each AdWords ad campaign contains one or more ad groups. Within a keyword targeted campaign, an ad group consists of one or more keywords and one or more text ads. Using ad groups lets you manage large lists of keywords and the ads that go with them.
When one of the keywords within an ad group matches a search that a user is making, Google displays one of the ads in the ad group on a search results page. You have no real control over which ad gets shown other than to tell Google that you want all ads shown evenly (if there are N ads that are to be shown T times, each ad is shown T/N times) or that the ads that are clicked on more often (i.e. they have better ad copy) are to be favored over the others. Each ad group typically only has a few ads that vary only slightly from each other for split testing purposes.
Although it’s possible to create ad groups with thousands of keywords, in general it’s a bad idea to do so. The best ad groups have a small number of thematically-related keywords — we’ll see why this is important when we discuss quality scores.
Keywords
Finally we get to the keyword themselves. In AdWords terminology, a “keyword” is a phrase of one or more words. Each keyword has a matching option associated with it. The matching option controls how the keyword is associated with the searches that users are performing on Google:
- Broad matching means that Google should consider synonyms, misspellings, word order changes, and other criteria when matching keywords. With broad matching, football equipment would match soccer equipment because in Europe football is the common term for soccer.
- Phrase matching means that the order of the words within the phrase is important. Thus the search queries best soccer equipment and soccer equipment reviews are phrase matches for soccer equipment but not phrase matches for equipment soccer.
- Exact matching means that queries must exactly match the given keyword — with no additional search terms. Thus best soccer equipment does NOT exactly match soccer equipment.
There’s actually a fourth matching option called negative matching that modifies the other three options. Negative matching excludes search queries that contain the given keyword/phrase.
Broad matching is the default matching option: just the keyword/phrase by itself. For phrase matching you surround the keyword/phrase with quotation marks. For exact matching, place the phrase in square brackets. Here are some examples:
soccer equipment broad match
"soccer equipment" phrase match
[soccer equipment] exact match
The negative options for these are:
-soccer equipment negative broad match
-"soccer equipment" negative phrase match
-[soccer equipment] negative exact match
See the AdWords help pages for more details on negative matching.
Why all these matching options? There are two reasons. The first is that they allow you fairly precise control over which specific search queries you want to target, including which ones you want excluded. The second reason is that you can bid separately on each variation of a keyword: you might be willing to pay more for someone who is doing an exact search for a product you’re promoting than someone who’s just search for broader information about the product category.
Creating the matching options is a pain to do by hand, though, because normally all you have is a list of keywords. Keyword Elite has an option to transform a list of keywords to include broad and/or exact match versions of keywords. Or you can use the free online AdWords Wrapper tool.
That’s it for today. Next time we’re going to look at the AdWords quality score and how keywords, text ads and landing pages are all related.
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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