A Guide to Google AdWords: Choosing the Keyword Match Type for Best Performance

Once your campaign is up and running, you’ll need to continually optimize your keywords to reach best performance. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look into how you can optimize your individual keywords to reach two important goals, increasing clicks to your website and reducing costs. Make the most out of your money and start optimizing efficiently. Keep reading to see how!

We continue the Guide to Google AdWords series with optimizing your campaign with matches. In Part 2, Selecting Keywords to Profit Your Business, you could read about the different keyword matches available in your campaign and which ones to start out with. Chances are, you have found well-performing keywords and not so efficient keywords. Now is the time to go through your campaign carefully and modify keyword matches to get the most out of your targeting.

Let’s take a look at 2 important goals and what you can do to reach them. As you examine your campaign performance, you may be checking the overall costs, cost per click, and quality score. Here are some measures on how to optimize your campaign by keywords!

Lower Costs

Perhaps you’ve found that certain keywords are just not getting any conversions even though they trigger clicks. Or maybe they are getting an occasional conversion but costing too much. What to do?

Choose exact match for more specified targeting. For example, people that search for [make a free site] probably just want to make a free website and nothing else. Use this specific match to reach more relevancy and therefore better keyword quality score.

Add negative keywords to your campaign. Negative keywords (example: -beginners) which will narrow down your search, so any search done that includes beginners will not trigger your ad. With negative keywords, you can make your keywords more relevant to searches, thus increasing CTR and eventually lowering costs.

A further suggestion to lower costs is to add long-tail keywords (keyword phrases that consist of more than 2 words). These keywords increase quality score because they are highly specific.

Increase Impressions and Clicks

Have you found a fantastic keyword theme but see that your keywords are not getting enough impressions and there are hardly any or no clicks? Try these tips.

Choose broad match, and broad match modifier for targeting your keywords. Make sure to expand your campaign with more keywords, adding them in broad match.

If you find broad match is making your campaign less efficient, try phrase match as it gives you the flexibility to appear for both broader search terms but with more specific targeting.

You can also check out what people searched for that triggered your ad by running a search terms report. It’s very easy, just click on your keywords in the ad group, and click on the button Details -> Searched Terms (selected or all). By viewing what people searched for, you can expand your campaign further by adding additional keywords to your campaign.

Stay tuned for the last part of our Google AdWords guide where we will discuss how to evaluate your campaign as a whole. If you haven’t started building your campaign yet, make sure you read Part 1, Setting up your campaign.

Don’t forget to read the instructions on how to monetize your website step by step.