Finding your perfect match, a partner to share your life with, is easy, right?

Nope.

In reality it can take some time and effort.

Some people take just as much time to find their perfect keyword match type for their Google AdWords campaigns.

This article will point you in the direction of your keyword life partners. And you don’t even need to buy me dinner or a movie.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is Google’s paid advertising program.  Ads appear in the Sponsored Links section of the Google results page, and are listed as “Google Sponsored Links” on websites that participate in the AdSense program.  Read more about Organic and Paid Search.

Careful keyword selection is a critical part of the success or failure of your Google AdWords program. Your ads get an impression each time they are shown. The type of match you select for your keywords has a big impact on how many impressions your ads get.  But in AdWords, it’s clicks that count, impressions aren’t everything.

The Google AdWords program offers different keyword matching options

Broad Match

This is the default option. Your ads show when people search for similar phrases to the one you have selected, and also, to quote Google for “other relevant variations” of the words you selected.

Your ads will get the maximum possible impressions but they won’t all be the impressions you want.

I’m going to stick with the dating example. If you’re not looking for a man, mentally replace the word “man” in the example with “woman” or whatever your main preference is.

You’re searching for a handsome man. If you use broad match, your ad will be shown when people search for:

• handsome man
• man handsome

This is good, this is want you want.

But, your ad will also show if people search for just the word “handsome” or just the word “man”. This is not exactly what you want but you can live with it.

But but but, your ad may also show if the word “man” is included in the search term, which might be “ugly man”,”mean man”, “neanderthal man” or “man with a bad attitude”, or a million other types of man that you’re not looking for.

Ok, yes, this is an extreme example to make my point, and it depends what Google considers to be a “relevant variation” of your keyword but you get what I’m trying to say, right?

Phrase Match

If you include your keywords in ” ” then your ad will only show when someone searches for both words, in the same order that you’ve used them.

So adding quote marks for phrase match “handsome man” means your ad will only show if the search term includes both words; handsome and man, in that order. Your ad won’t show if the words aren’t in the same order so if you use phrase match, also add the keyword “man handsome” to your list.

Phrase match is my favourite type of keyword match (yes, it is true, Search-Mel has a favourite type of keyword match)

Exact Match

This is similar to phrase match except that there can’t be any words in between your selected words.  Use the [ ] to choose exact match.  So if I use exact match, eg [ handsome man ] my ad will only show when people search exactly for handsome man.

The fourth type of keyword is negative keywords.  Which I’ll cover some other time.

When using the Google keyword tool, you can choose what match type you want to see the search volumes for by selecting the match type in the left hand column.  Review all search volumes relative to each other, not as hard and fast numbers.  You want the term with the highest search volume and lowest competition.  Read articles on keyword research and where to use keywords.

Too funny, I just searched for “handsome man” using the Keyword Tool.  On a broad match, 2400 people in Australia looked for that dude last month, 1900 looked for the phrase match and 480 looked exactly for a handsome man.  Wonder if they found him on Google?

Search-Mel