The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

As if keyword selection wasn't enough work, you need to set a “match type” for every keyword in your ad groups. I have already discussed keyword match types in detail in our Best Practices tutorial, so I’ll be focusing on a single detail: using the ActEngine to include more “precise” matches for all of your keywords.

The major search advertising networks allow you to target keywords based on three different match types: exact, phrase, and broad. (Or four, if you include “negative” keywords in the list.) Exact match requires a user to enter a query that exactly matches your keyword or keyword phrase in order for an ad to display.  Phrase match requires a user to enter all the terms in a keyword phrase in the same order, but extra terms may appear in the query. (So if you're bidding on "men’s suits," "black men’s suits" would work, but "suits for men" wouldn't.) Broad match allows a keyword to trigger on queries that the search network deems similar to the targeted keyword. (This can really be very broad: the query “tulip” might trigger your ads if you bid on the broad match keyword “flower”.)

As we’ve repeatedly emphasized in discussions of Google’s “Quality Score,” a more precise match between your keywords and a user’s search will result in higher-quality and higher-value traffic for the advertiser - and, just as importantly, more relevant results for the user. In order to ensure that you are getting the highest-quality traffic possible, you should try to “match” a user’s query as closely as possible. We’ve found that more precisely matched keywords consistently have a higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate. This doesn’t mean that you should only bid on Exact Match terms: you want to be able to capture the traffic generated by Phrase and Broad match keywords. However, if you have the more precisely matched version of your keywords in your ad group alongside the broader terms, you’ll get the best of both worlds: you’ll capture traffic that you would have missed when a user searches for a keyword phrase that you didn’t include exactly, and you’ll also capture extremely high-quality traffic when a user looks for your exact terms.

To do this, your ad groups should always include an “Exact” equivalent to every “Phrase” or “Broad” match term, and a “Phrase” equivalent to every “Broad” term. Doing this manually would be extremely time-consuming, but we’ve recently introduced new recommendations into the ActEngine that will help you to perform this function with one click. If you see one of our “Add Keyword Match Type” recommendations, all you need to do is accept it and the appropriate Phrase and Exact match terms will be added to your keyword lists. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Most people assume that the same collection of keywords in their Google, MSN, and Yahoo accounts will

Nice article, Hanny.

Having the appropriate <a href=www.pitstopmedia.com/.../ppc-keyword-match-types>ppc keyword match types</a> can have definitely a huge positive impact on the campaigns. I once managed to cut down the cpa significantly just by switching a few keywords to exact match.