Keywords are Curate's Egg, Make the Most of Them

Keywords are at the center of managing a search ad campaign.

You can further divide them into Exact, Phrase and Broad. They Provide targeting precision in the same order. Broad gives you really broad coverage of search queries, you need to block the bad part of it on routine basis. No matter how old and tight your campaigns are they will keep on surprising you. To a lesser extent same is the case with phrase too, however we can guess its bad part with reasonably good accuracy. Those who live and breathe exact matches find it too costly, sooner or later.

3 Solutions for Managing Keyword Match types

1. All Match Types In the Same Adgroup

   An age old practice in adwords. Soon after finishing up with Keyword List, break them into Three Parts: [kw], "kw" & kw, then & there. If you remember, we used to set the bids too using asterix after them. You can bid on them in decreasing order starting from highest for exact and lowest for broad for the same keyword. Earlier, no matter how many times you have added the keywords, Google consolidated the stats for them and assigned same Quality Score irrespective of the match types. However, things have changed now and all are treated differently. There are reports that it is no more the most restrictive type which will reflect the stats, actually broad may compete with exact and phrase for same query. So, this technique though has the merit of simplicity, there are some caveats associated with it.

2. Different adgroups for different match types

   Maintaining different adgroups for each match types allows you to add negative as exact in broad and phrase adgroups. So you go like this Phrase Adgroup will have Exact as negative and broad will have phrase as negative. In this way you will have traffic for each adgroups which does not interfere with each other and so you can set bids according to priority. This method achieves everything except for segregation of budget.

3. Different Match types in different Campaigns

   To allocate different Budget which are allocated to each type you need to segregate them into Campaign. I had talked about penumbra match type, for brand keywords. However, no matter what match type you added Google blocks all the queries around it and it spills over to many keywords. So, to keep tab on them it is better to put them into different campaigns now. Also, keeping different match types in different campaigns will give you better ROI, because there is nil chance your bad keywords eating into the share of Good ones. So, if you are dealing with account that has limited number of keywords and accuracy matters the most, it should be implemented.