The Key Areas of Great Pay Per Click Advertising – Part Two

This is Part Two of a two-part series. If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

In Part One, we looked at how to create your first ad groups in Google AdWords to start you off and ensure that your advertisements are relevant. We also took a quick look at the exact match option. In this post, as a PPC management company, we’re going to look at the other two match types to give you a solid understanding of how to choose the right one.

To recap, the three match types in Google AdWords are:

• Exact Match
• Phrase Match
• Broad Match

We already looked at exact match in Part One. Let’s take a closer look at the other two—phrase and broad match—separately.

Phrase Match

Choosing phrase match means that a keyword will trigger your ad to appear only when someone searches for your exact keyword phrase or close variations of your exact keyword phrase. These variations may even include words before or after your keyword.

Close variations include:

• Acronyms
• Singular and plural forms
• Misspellings
• Stemmings (e.g. floor vs. flooring)
• Abbreviations
• Accents

So in this case, if someone were to search “top salesforce consultant” or “salesforce consultant Toronto”, your ad will still appear.

Broad Match

Choosing broad match allows for even more variation, but keep in mind that this means your ad will not always be as relevant to the search terms. This triggers your ad to appear whenever someone searches:

• That phrase
• Similar phrases
• Singular or plural forms
• Misspellings
• Synonyms
• Stemmings (e.g. floor vs flooring)
• Related searches
• Other relevant variations

The upside of broad match is that you will learn about other relevant keywords that may not already be on your original list. However, the downside is that you will be paying for clicks in the beginning that are not relevant to what you do.

When starting your pay per click advertising campaign, it’s best to start with exact match to ensure that you aren’t paying for unnecessary clicks. This also allows you to see the performance of your keywords so you can weed out anything that just isn’t working for you.

If you have a larger budget or have been working with exact match for some time and want to expand, you may want to transition to phrase match in order to uncover additional keywords and drive traffic, ultimately driving more leads and sales for your business.

Negative Keyword Lists

If you do choose to transition to phrase match, make sure to check the keywords that you’re paying for on a daily basis. Below is an example of how phrase match can generate the wrong clicks:

Of course, you don’t want Spanish speaking, reiki, or sex therapist in this case, because the user likely would have been more specific in their search terms if that’s what they wanted. In order to ensure that you don’t pay for these terms, you can create a negative keyword list. This means that your ads will not show if any of these keywords are in the search term. Here’s an example of a non-exhaustive list:

Long Tail Keywords

Last but definitely not least, we have long tail keywords. If the CPC for your industry is very high, you may consider using long tail keywords, which are keywords with more than three words. As an example, in the personal injury law market, CPC is very high. So we developed a list of mid and long tail keywords to reduce the CPC, as you can see below:

By choosing the right keywords and match type, you can build an extremely powerful pay per click advertising campaign that gets you results.

Please share any thoughts or questions with us in the comments below!