Select Keywords for Broadly Focused Ads

The broadly focused keyword selection process for ads promoting a brand line or a whole product market say digital cameras, for instance is much more complex. Rather than spending hours brainstorming, trying to come up with dozens, or even hundreds, of appropriate keywords, I recommend using a keyword selection tool of some kind. Most search engines, including Google, offer such a tool.

By entering in a word or phrase, like digital cameras, you will receive a list of sometimes hundreds of related keywords. Please do not attempt to use them all without reviewing them first. Many will be less relevant than you would hope, and some may be far too specific for your broadly focused ad. But if you slowly go down the list, deciding which words and phrases are appropriate and which are not, you will have built a comprehensive keyword list in a fraction of the time it would take to think of them all on your own.

TIP: If you are looking for a professional version of a keyword suggestion tool, Wordtracker goes well beyond the tools currently provided by Google AdWords and its competitors. Wordtracker collects actual search terms that have been submitted to not one but a collection of multiple search engines through the search service called Dogpile (www.dogpile.com). Dogpile lets users conduct searches on many different search engines at the same time. Its database of 340 million search queries is available to Wordtracker users, and when you receive results, they are ranked by how frequently they appeared in search engine queries in the recent past.

It can be hard work to set up large numbers of narrowly focused ad groups, and you might have to set up dozens before they collectively approach the volume level of a single broadly focused ad, but the higher margins might be worth the extra effort. If you concentrate on broadly focused ads, the volume will be much easier to generate, but narrower margins might mean little or no actual profit. There is a way, though, that you can sometimes have your cake and eat it too.

A few search engines (Google is one of them) offer an often overlooked feature that allows you to dynamically insert keywords into your ad text and, even more important, your destination link. “What does this mean?” you might ask.

This means that you can write a broad-appeal ad and use the keyword insertion function to customize that ad to match the search terms the user entered, making it appear as narrowly focused as needed to attract the user’s attention. Even better, you can customize the destination link with some affiliate programs to dynamically pass the search terms along to the affiliate site, so it can serve up exactly what the user was searching for in the first place. By writing a single ad and collecting a much looser selection of keywords into a single ad group, you can get much of the benefit of narrowly focused ads without the labor-intensive process of creating dozens (or more) of ad groups. I give an example later in the article when we set up our first campaigns.

Keyword Matching Options

Of course, just selecting your keywords isn’t all you need to worry about. Each keyword you select also needs a matching option. There are four basic types, though sometimes search engines call them by different names. They are broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.

Broad Match. Abroad match designation means that if your keyword or keywords appear anywhere in the search terms used, your ad will be considered for display on the results page. If yankee is on your ad’s keyword list, then your ad might show up in a search for “Yankee baseball cards,” but your ad might also show up in a search for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. You can see how using broad match could hurt your efforts to display your ad only in front of the most relevant audience possible.

However, if you believe the overwhelming majority of searches using your keyword are in fact relevant, you could safely use broad match, along with a just few negative match keywords to weed out the irrelevant searches. I talk about negative match in a minute.

Phrase Match. The phrase match designation means that if your keywords appear, in order, anywhere in the search terms used, your ad will be considered for display on the results page. For instance, if your phrase matched keywords are “Pittsburgh bus schedule,” your ad might appear in the results for a search of “find Pittsburgh bus schedule,” but it would not appear in the search results for “When is Jerome ‘the Bus’ Bettis scheduled to return to Pittsburgh?” If you use broad match, your ad might appear in both search results.

Exact Match. This designation means that your ad will be considered for display on the results page only if your keyword or words exactly match the search terms. If you choose to use exact match for the keyword phrase, “Used Atari 5200,” your ad would not display in a search for “Find used Atari 5200.” I’m not a big fan of exact match, generally speaking, but you might find some use for it. As a search marketer, I believe that broad or phrase match combined with some negative keywords is probably almost always going to work better than exact match.

Negative Match. This match type is a little different than the others in that it affects all the other keywords in your ad group (or campaign, if you use campaign-level negative match). Any word you add to your keyword list with a negative match designation will cause any other keyword in your list not to trigger your ads if the search term also includes the negative keyword. If you have an ad for baseball equipment and one of your keywords is “bats,” for instance, then adding “vampire” as a negative keyword would help you avoid showing your ad to uninterested horror film aficionados, which would probably lower your click-through rate. Some search engines, like Google, will use broad match by default, while others default to exact match. Either way, you need to decide for yourself which matching option is right for each keyword and keyword phrase. I provide some examples later in the article when we actually build some campaigns.