The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Most people assume that the same collection of keywords in their Google, MSN, and Yahoo accounts will match the same set of queries by Google, MSN, and Yahoo users, respectively.  This is not the case, because queries and keywords are not the same thing, and the different search engines handle the mapping between them quite differently.  Although the set of possible queries that users could submit to each of these engines is theoretically the same, the ways in which these search engines match up user queries with the advertiser keywords listed in their accounts are significantly different.  Most notably, Yahoo treats different grammatical variants and spelling variants of the same words or phrases as one word (so chiropractor = chiropractors = chiropractic = a chiropractor = the chiropractors, and ugg = uggs = ugs = uggz).  Google and MSN, however would treat these as separate keywords that you would bid on separately.  In this article, I will explain how these differences affect your accounts, and how to make sure all of the queries that you want to match to are covered by your keywords.

Mapping Queries to Keywords

Lots of different queries that users submit to search engines mean exactly the same thing, and the search engines do us a favor by neutralizing superficial differences between them.  For example, the queries “ally mcbeal dvd”, “Ally McBeal DVD”, and “ally mcbeal DVD” are all distinct search queries, but we know that they all mean the same thing.  The only difference is in the case of the characters, which is a factor that all of the major search engines will ignore.  I would be pretty irritated if search engines made me enter each of these as separate keywords.  But what about “allie mcbeal DVD” (misspelled) or “ally mcbeal DVDs” (plural) or “an ally mcbeal DVD” (grammatical variant).  Do these queries really mean the same thing and deserve to be neutralized into a single keyword?  Or should advertisers be given the opportunity and responsibility, to independently choose whether they want to advertise for these queries, and how much they want to bid?  This is a difficult question, and one that Yahoo has answered differently from Google, and MSN.  For Yahoo Search Marketing, “ally mcbeal dvd”, “allie mcbeal dvd”, “ally mcbeal DVDs”, and “an ally mcbeal DVD” are all the "same" keyword.  If you try to submit more than one of the superficial variants of this keyword, they will be rejected as "duplicate" keywords.

Benefits and Drawbacks to Yahoo's Keyword Consolidation

For most advertisers, Yahoo's practice of more aggressively consolidating keywords is an advantage.  You get more query coverage out of fewer keywords in your account, and you don't have to do all the work of adding singular and plural forms of every word, and coming up with likely spelling errors.  Yahoo does all of that for you.

The downside of this practice is that occasionally Yahoo neutralizes distinctions between queries that really do mean different things (although this is the exception, rather than the rule).  Here are a few examples:

• "giant baseballs" vs. "Giants baseball"
• "Windows repair" vs. "window repair"
• "rings" vs. "The Ring"

Another downside of Yahoo’s approach is the confusion that can result when you convert a Google AdWords campaign to a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign.  Most people have multiple grammatical variants of their keywords in their Google AdWords accounts.  However, when you convert these to Yahoo, Yahoo does not give you an easy way to choose which one of the superficial variants of your keywords is selected to exist in your account, while rejecting all others as duplicates. Instead, Yahoo will upload and accept the first keywords it finds in the AdWords file you import.  So, if your list is ordered alphabetically, it will choose the first variant alphabetically (not the semantically most obvious one).  In each of the lists below, the first keyword is the one Yahoo would select, instead of the most frequently searched-for term in the family, which I've starred:

1. a management seminar
2. management seminar
3. management seminars*
4. management seminars

1. tennis shoe
2. tennis shoes*

1. NY chiropracter
2. NY chiropractor*

Keep this in mind if you use dynamic keyword insertion.  For your most important keywords, check and make sure that the variant of that keyword that Yahoo has is the best one.

Considerations for Google and MSN Accounts

On Google and MSN, you, the advertiser, must do all the work of selecting grammatical and spelling variants of your keywords.  Unlike Yahoo, they won't do it for you.  To do this effectively, you should permute your keywords for each of these factors, if applicable:

• Singular and plural: "lawyer" vs. "lawyers"
• Grammatical phrasing: "symphony tickets" vs. "tickets to symphony" vs. "tickets to the symphony" vs. "a symphony ticket"
• Verb and noun inflections: "incorporate a business" vs. "incorporating a business" vs. "business incorporation"
• Words derived with suffixes: "marriage counseling" vs. "marital counseling" vs. "marriage counselor" vs. "marital counselor"
• Common misspellings: "pediatrician" vs. "pediatritian" vs. "pediatrican"

To some extent, Google and MSN offer their users the opportunity to match a broader set of queries with a single keyword using broad match (if you are interested in trying broader match types, check out the awesome new Keyword Match Type recommendation in Clickable).  But in the high-traffic, high-value areas of your account, you should really make sure you've explicitly covered all of the obvious query variants of your keywords.

This discussion has perhaps been more of an in-depth lesson in linguistics than your typical marketer really needs in order to manage their search campaign.  However, the important takeaway is that mapping queries to keywords is a complex computational problem that different search engines handle differently.  When counting by Google's standards, your typical product or service does not have one name, but dozens of grammatically related names that mean roughly the same thing.  And just as the search engines must consider this issue in designing their algorithms, we marketers should consider the full grammatical diversity of the ways in which our customers express their wants and needs to the search engine.

Ehren, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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