PPC (Pay Per Click). Match Types Explained. Part i

Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ent match types that can be employed in a Google PPC (Pay Per Click) cam­paign is vital to the ongo­ing suc­cess of the project. Dif­fer­ent match types can have dif­fer­ent strengths and under­stand­ing these is a very impor­tant step. There are four dif­fer­ent match types that can be used and this blog post will intro­duce the first two.

Broad Match

Exam­ples: bed­ding, lamps, tv stands

This is where your key­word can appear any­where within the google search bar. So if your term is bed­ding, it will appear if some­one types in bed­ding, plain bed­ding or the most amaz­ing bed­ding in the world. Google will also some­times show your adverts for terms related to bed­ding that it deems rel­e­vant (i.e. duvet, bed­sheets etc...). Broad Match is great for get­ting high vol­umes of traf­fic, but is hard to con­trol and unless you have a very well main­tained list of neg­a­tives (more of them later) it can pull in a lot of irrel­e­vant search. A Broad Match cam­paign that isn’t man­aged prop­erly will likely drain your bud­get very quickly with lim­ited suc­cess.

Broad Match Mod­i­fier:

Exam­ples: +beau­ti­ful +bed­ding, +lux­ury +white +bed­ding.

Broad Match Mod­i­fier allows you greater con­trol over your broad match­ing terms. The +sym­bol added to the start of words means that the search query has to con­tain all those words within it in order to show your adverts. For exam­ple, a term of +beau­ti­ful +bed­ding will show for beau­ti­ful and lux­ury bed­ding whole­salers, but not for bed­ding sup­pli­ers online. The Mod­i­fier option also isn’t lim­ited to all your words within the search query so there is good room for exper­i­men­ta­tion. The phrase lux­ury white bed­ding for exam­ple, could be writ­ten +lux­ury +white bed­ding, lux­ury +white +bed­ding and +lux­ury white +bed­ding to pull in every vari­a­tion of those three terms.

Research­ing your ini­tial and most prof­itable key­words, along with ongo­ing hon­ing of your neg­a­tive list to make it as rel­e­vant as pos­si­ble, is just one of many key areas to a suc­cess­ful PPC cam­paign.
Next time I will be look­ing at Phrase and Exact Matches and, ulti­mately, where and how these dif­fer­ent terms work best.