Written by Chris Barling
Monday, 11 July 2011 00:00
Each search engine has its own rules on which ad will be triggered by searches, on which keywords. You control matches by specifying your own key words and how these should be matched to what’s being searched. On Google, a ’phrase match‘ uses quotes (“ ”) around your keywords and an ’exact match‘ uses square brackets ([ ]), otherwise it’s a ’broad match‘ .
You need to understand how the matching rules work. For instance, beware of insisting on an exact match as you may exclude plurals but also beware of broad matches which may unexpectedly lead to higher spend and irrelevant traffic. You should also use negative matching which is where keywords will not match if a particular negative word is also being searched for. Using negatives can increase click through rates and reduce costs from irrelevant clicks and can be applied at campaign level. When quotes are used which signify phrase matching (Google and Bing) then this will match with searchers who use the particular keywords along with additional words before or after. An exact match [square brackets] matches only when those exact keywords in the exact order, with no additional words, are searched for. Because it’s difficult, you may be able to out-perform the competition by detailed understanding and hard work.
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