Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [239]
In looking at the complete ad for fishing poles provided by Dick’s Sporting Goods, the display URL is for www.DicksSportingGoods.com/FishingPoles. This relevant, matched advertisement gives Dick’s Sporting Goods the only ad with three matching bold terms in each text area along with a compelling offer of free shipping (refer to Figures 19-1 and 19-3). No other ad in this group competes in terms of relevance, offer, and visibility.
Understand the Keyword-Matching Categories
This may be one of the most misunderstood areas of developing a PPC campaign. When selecting the keywords for your campaign, you can also determine the matching preference for that keyword. To explain further, you can bid on a keyword, but that keyword is usually used in various forms and phrases by searchers. You do not have to bid on every version of the word, because there are always irrelevant versions of words. The search engines allow you to set your preferred level of variance and acceptance for those words. This is one area where advertisers can make big budget mistakes, because it requires a certain level of knowledge about setting up a campaign based on keywords. Although it is easy to say that you want a certain ad to appear when a searcher uses a particular phrase, it is difficult to then define the parameters of how and when your ad should show.
You can increase the effectiveness of your spend by managing these keyword-matching factors closely. You can also lose control of your budget very quickly if you don’t utilize these tools.
Broad Match
Broad match is the default setting for most keyword-bidding tools. Unfortunately for advertisers, this is also the easiest way to lose control of a budget. A broad match keyword, such as fishing, will cause your ad to show up for search phrases that have any variation or phrase that has fishing included. It would also show up for fish, fishes, and fishing boat. The word you choose to broad match will cause the ad to show for any combination of words, in any type of search phrase that might match the word.
One of the best examples of this was a company that was in the silicon oil business and set the keyword campaign to broad match on the word silicon. As you can image, the ad appeared for any search phrase that had any inclusion of the word silicon. You can let your mind wander as to the types of keywords that use silicon and the many other industries that are well-known for silicon. Despite the ad being a technical ad for a specific type of silicon oil, the number of clicks the ad ended up costing this company $4,000 in less than 10 days.
Broad-matching keywords is a good way to cover a lot of area, but it could also lead to your ad showing up for alternate variations that are not accurate or would attract qualified visitors. This is where knowing the full range of related and unrelated keywords will benefit you as you set up the campaign specific to the keyword or phrase that is accurate to your business and your goal for that ad group.
Exact Match
The opposite of the broad match is the exact match. In this case, when you add the keyword phrase into the ad group, you include brackets around the single word or quotes around a phrase.
For the single-word exact match, you would add the keyword as follows: [fishing]. This means the ad would appear only for those searchers who use the single keyword fishing as their whole search phrase. Unless that word is part of the search phrase, it won’t show the ad.
Using a single word as a keyword is rarely advised, because single words usually have very high search volume, which will cause your ad to show frequently. If the ad is not relevant to the many uses or associations that single word may have, then your CTR will drop, which in turn drops your quality score. Using additional terms enhances the focus of the campaign to the target searcher and their intent.
Adding quotes to the keyword as a phrase, such as fishing tackle, creates an exact