Selecting a bunch of great, relevant keywords for your AdWords campaign is a solid foundation for ad dollars well spent. But you can make those keywords work harder for you by using negative keywords, exact match, and phrase match in addition to the default broad match your keywords assume.

Negative keywords will keep away clicks on your ads from people who are expecting something else entirely. For example, if you have a taxi service in Manchester, New Hampshire, you don’t want to pay for clicks from people in Manchester, England who are looking for taxi services, so you could use “England” or “UK” as negative keywords by simply placing a minus sign in front of them as you add them to your AdWords keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords with Google, and you don’t have to pay for them, so you might as well put them to work for you.

Exact match is the strictest positive match, because even slight variations on the phrase will not cause your ad to show up. You designate a keyword phrase as an exact match by placing square brackets around it. Phrase match is less strict than exact match, because the exact phrase plus other words will bring up your ad. To designate a word or phrase as a phrase match, put it in double quotation marks. Broad match is the default, and you don’t add any brackets, quotation marks, or other symbols to it. In general, with broad matches, you’ll get more click throughs, but fewer conversions due to a higher risk of non-relevant searches bringing up your ad.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 12:52 am and is filed under PPC Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.