Refining Your PPC Keywords

Once that you’ve gone through the first step you can refine your keyword list further by selecting the type of match that you want your keywords to show for. This is extremely important.

With Adwords you have 3 options which are broad match, phrase match, or exact match.

Choosing the wrong match type will cost you a lot of money!

The broad match choice will show your advert when the keywords you have chosen, plurals of them, synonyms (i.e. other words that mean the same thing, for example shoes > sneakers > trainers > etc), etc are searched for in any order.

For example, using our red shoes example again if you had “red shoes” as your keyword phrase set in broad match, then your ad would show for searches like the ones below:

Red shoes

Shoes with red laces

Shoes worn by Red Buttons

Etc.

Clearly this will put your ad in front of a lot of people who will have no interest whatsoever in your products or services, and the more that your ad appears for generic searches, the more clicks you’ll get and the more it’ll cost you.

Broad match should really be avoided at all costs.

To set your keywords list to broad match you simple have a line of text like:

Red Shoes

The phrase match choice will show your ad only when the keywords you have chosen are searched for in the same order, and with other words included.

For example, using our “red shoes” key phrase again with phrase match set your ad would show in searches like the ones below:

Red Shoes

Buy red shoes

Cheap red shoes

Red shoes with laces

Etc.

The ad wouldn’t show if the search contained those words out of order, so for example “red dancing shoes” wouldn’t show the ad since there is a word between red and shoes.

This is a very useful setting and helps you to more carefully limit the types of visitors that will end up clicking on your ads to arrive at your website.

To set your keywords to phrase match you simply put each phrase inside inverted commas like:

“Red Shoes”

The final setting is the exact match choice that will only deliver results if the search is exactly the same as your keyword or phrase, so for example with our red shoes example set to exact match your ad will only show when someone searches for:

Red shoes

It will not show for any other search.

This setting allows you to very specifically limit the searches that your ads will show for and can help to reduce spurious clicks significantly.

To set exact match you simply put your keywords inside square brackets like:

[Red Shoes]

Determining whether you should use phrase match or exact match comes down really to your own industry, business, and customer base, but our recommendation is that you use the methods outlined in part 4 to choose high quality keywords and phrases and then set them to exact match.

This allows you to have complete control over your PPC ads, to be extremely specific about when your ads show, and consequently to deliver only motivated visitors to your site, and to reduce your PPC costs to the absolute minimum.

This method will return the maximum return on investment for your PPC advertising and will result in the maximum conversion rate possible.

It can be difficult to convince yourself to adopt this approach since it feels like you are making your campaign too narrow, and that you will be missing potential customers, but this is absolutely not the case.

Remember that anything that you implement can be reversed easily if necessary, but we can assure you from a lot of experience that once you have refined your PPC campaign like this and seen the difference that it makes to your PPC costs and performance, you will not want to revert back to the wasteful and expensive model that you used before.

The next step covered in part 3 is to make sure that your PPC ads appeal to people who want to buy and discourage people who aren’t looking to buy from clicking on them and costing you money.